Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction: On Nature 9781472546708, 9780826497796, 9781472527097

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For Nick Butler To the memory of Grandad And two who have become separated in the one bright bitter sea

Abbreviations

In the text, references are given ¢rst to the English translation, if available, and then to the original. Some translations have been modi¢ed. Martin Heidegger AF BDT BPP BT CTP DT EL FCM

FS GA69 GA77

(1975 [1950]), `The Anaximander Fragment' in Early Greek Thinking. Translated by David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper and Row. (1971 [1951]), `Building, Dwelling, Thinking' in Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row. (1982 [1927]), The Basic Problems of Phenomenology [Summer Semester (SS)]. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. (1962 [1927]), Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. (1999 [1936^8]), Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning. Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. (1966 [1959]), Discourse on Thinking (Gelassenheit). Translated by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freud. San Francisco: Harper and Row. (1971 [1957]), `The Nature of Language' in On the Way to Language. Translated by Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper and Row. (1995), Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics World-¢nitude-solitude [1929^30] (GA 29/30). Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. (2003), Four Seminars: Le Thor 1966, 1968, 1969, ZÌhringen 1973 (GA 15). Translated by Franc°ois Ra¡oul and Andrew Mitchell. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. (1998 [1938^40]), Geschichte des Seyns (GA 69). Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998. (1995 [1944^45]), Feldweg-GesprÌche (GA 77). Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995.

Abbreviations HI HW ID IM IWM KPM L LH M MFL NI NI NII NII NIII NIV OWA P Ph PWM

ix

(1996), HÎlderlin's Hymn `The Ister' [SS 1942]. Translated by William McNeill and Julia Davis. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. (1950), Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. (1974 [1957]), Identity and Di¡erence. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York: Evanston; London: Harper and Row. (2000), Introduction to Metaphysics [SS 1935] (GA 40). Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. (1998 [1949]), `Introduction to ``What is Metaphysics?'' ' in Pathmarks. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Edited by William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1990 [1929, 1973]), Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Translated by Richard Taft. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. (1971 [1950b]), `Language' in Poetry, Language, Thought, op. cit. (1998 [1946]), `Letter on ``Humanism'' ' in Pathmarks, op. cit. Translated by Frank A. Capuzzi. (2006 [1938^9]), Mindfulness (GA 66). Translated by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary. London: Continuum. (1984), The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic [SS 1928] (GA 26). Translated by Michael Hein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (1981 [1936^7]), Nietzsche Volume 1: The Will to Power as Art (GA 43). Translated by David Farrell Krell. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (1961), Nietzsche: Erster Band. Pfullingen: GÏnther Neske. (1984 [1937, 1954]), Nietzsche Volume 2: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same (GA 44). Translated by David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper and Row. (1961), Nietzsche: Zweiter Band. Pfullingen: GÏnther Neske. (1987 [1939]), Nietzsche Volume 3: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics. Translated by David Farrell Krell, Joan Stambaugh and Frank A. Capuzzi. San Francisco: Harper and Row. (1982), Nietzsche Volume 4: Nihilism. Edited by David Farrell Krell. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi. San Francisco: Harper and Row. (1971 [1936]), `The Origin of the Work of Art' in Poetry, Language, Thought, op. cit. (1992), Parmenides [1942^3]. Translated by Andre¨ Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (1998 [1939]), `On the Essence and Concept of Physis in Aristotle's Physics B, I' in Pathmarks, op. cit. Translated by Thomas Sheehan. (1998 [1943]), `Postscript to ``What is Metaphysics?'' ' in Pathmarks, op. cit. Translated by William McNeill.

x QB QCT SR TB Th VA W WCT WM

Abbreviations (1998 [1955]), `On the Question of Being' in Pathmarks, op. cit. Translated by William McNeill. (1977), The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Edited by William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row. (1977 [1954]), `Science and Re£ection' in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Edited by William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row. (1972), On Time and Being [1969]. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper and Row. (1971 [1950a]), `The Thing' in Poetry, Language, Thought, op. cit. (2000 [1954]), VortrÌge und AufsÌtze (GA 7). Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. (1967), Wegmarken. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. (1968 [1951^2]), What is Called Thinking? (GA 8). Translated by John Glenn Gray and Fred Wieck. New York: Harper and Row. (1998 [1929]), `What is Metaphysics?' in Pathmarks, op. cit. Translated by David Farrell Krell.

Jacques Lacan SVII

(1992), Seminar Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959^1960. Translated by Dennis Porter. London: Routledge.

Emmanuel Levinas AE DF DMT DVI EE EE EN GDT GP

IOF

(1978 [1974]), Autrement qu'eªtre ou au-dela© de l'essence. The Hague: Martinus Nijho¡. (2000), `Dying For' [1987] in Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other. Translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. London: Athlone, pp. 207^217. (1993 [1975^6]), Dieu, La Mort et Le Temps. Edited by Jacques Rolland. Paris: Grasset. (1982 [1975]), `Dieu et la Philosophie' in De Dieu Qui Vient a© l'Ide¨e. Paris: Vrin, pp. 93^127. (1978 [1947]), Existence and Existents. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijho¡. (1986 [1947]), De L'Existence a© l'Existant. Paris: Vrin. (1991 [1951]), Entre Nous: Essais sur le Penser-a©-l'Autre. Paris: Grasset. (2000 [1975^6]), God, Death and Time. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (1996 [1975]), `God and Philosophy' in Basic Philosophical Writings. Edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 129^148. (1996 [1951]), `Is Ontology Fundamental?' in Basic Philosophical Writings, op. cit., pp. 1^10.

Abbreviations MT OB PP PP TA TD TH TH TI TI TO VD

xi

(1991 [1975^6]), La Mort et le Temps. Paris: L'Herne. (1981 [1974]), Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijho¡. (1996 [1984]), `Peace and Proximity' in Basic Philosophical Writings. op. cit., pp. 161^169. (1984), `Paix et Proximite¨' in Les Cahiers de la Nuit Surveille¨e, no. 3: Emmanuel Levinas. Edited by Jacques Rolland. Lagrasse: Verdier, pp. 339^346. (1983 [1947]), Le Temps et l'Autre. Paris: PUF. (1996 [1972]), `Truth of Disclosure and Truth of Testimony' in Basic Philosophical Writings, op. cit., pp. 97^108. (1996 [1962]), `Transcendence and Height' in Basic Philosophical Writings, op. cit., pp. 11^32. (1991 [1962]), `Transcendance et Hauteur' in Emmanuel Levinas. Edited by Catherine Chalier and Miguel Abensour. Paris: L'Herne, pp. 97^112. (1969 [1961]), Totality and In¢nity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. (1971 [1961]), Totalite¨ et In¢ni. The Hague: Martinus Nijho¡. (1987 [1947]), `Time and the Other' in Time and the Other and Additional Essays. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, pp. 29^94. (1972), `Ve¨rite¨ du de¨voilement et ve¨rite¨ du te¨moignage' in Le Te¨moignage. Edited by E. Castelli. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, pp. 101^110.

Karl Marx B CI EcPh GI ICPE JQ PP

(1977 [1852]), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Edited by David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (1990 [1867]), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, in association with New Left Review. (1977 [1932]), Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in Karl Marx: Selected Writings op. cit. (1998 [1845]), The German Ideology. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. (1998 [1930]), `Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy' in The German Ideology. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. (1983 [1844]), `On the Jewish Question' in The Portable Marx. Edited by Eugene Kamenka. London: Penguin. (1977 [1847]), The Poverty of Philosophy in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, op. cit.

xii

Abbreviations

Slavoj Z­iz­ek B FA FTKN LA PV SOI TS

(2001), On Belief. London and New York: Routledge. (2000), The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London: Verso. (1991), For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso. (1991), Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. (2006), The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (1989), The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. (2000 [1999]), The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London; New York: Verso (1st edition, 1999, subtitled `An Essay in Political Ontology').

Introduction: On the Apocalypse of Nature

Nature and Earth What happens to nature in technology, when nature is separated out from beings by the natural sciences? The growing, or rather simply unfolding to its end, destruction of `nature'. What was it once? The moment-site for the arrival and dwelling of gods, when the site ^ still physis ^ rested in the essencing of being [Wesung des Seyns]. Since then physis quickly became a being and then even the counterpart to `grace' ^ and, after this demoting, was ultimately reduced to the forcing [Verzwingung] of calculating machination and economy. And ¢nally what was left was only `scenery' and recreational opportunity and even this still calculated into the gigantic and arranged for the masses. And then? Is this the end? Why does the earth keep silent [schweigt] in this destruction? Because earth is not allowed the strife with a world, because earth is not allowed the truth of being [Wahrheit des Seyns]. Why not? Because the more gigantic that giantthing called man becomes, the smaller he also becomes? Must nature be surrendered and abandoned to machination? Are we still capable of seeking earth anew? Who enkindles that strife in which the earth ¢nds itself open, in which the earth encloses itself and is earth? (CTP: 195/ 277^8) The imminent end of nature is an apocalypse. Apokalypsis means `revelation', literally to tear away (apo) a concealing veil (kalyptra), and, following the events depicted in the Book of Revelation (Apocalypse), has come to mean `the end of the world'. Perhaps for the ¢rst time, it is possible that today nature will be revealed to us, along with our dependence upon it and the almost complete destruction which human technology has wreaked. Today this excess of techne, human arti¢ce, is clearly revealed by the fact that it has reached such a level that it is approaching not just its own destruction but also the destruction of nature itself, so far has it come to dominate the dichotomy of `nature' and `culture'. Its destruction of nature destroys both itself and the very opposition between nature and culture. Thus, at the limit, technology, which denies its dependence on nature, oblivious to the fact that nature could one day be exhausted, is ¢nally forced to confront this fact.

2

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

This book pursues the hypothesis that the thought of Martin Heidegger demonstrates that we are ethically called to bear this imminent destruction of nature constantly in mind and refuse to rest content until its full revelatory capacity has been actualized. Above all what comes to light today is that we are beholden to protect nature not just because man depends upon it, but to protect it as it is in itself, for its own sake. `Nature in itself ', beyond the dichotomy of nature and culture, beyond nature understood with respect to human ends, is today being revealed. And the hypothesis which this book proposes is that it is Heidegger who best responds to the manifestation of this ahuman nature. `The renewed attempt to clarify the essence of physis by way of an analogy with techne fails precisely here from every conceivable point of view. This means: we must understand the essence of physis entirely from out of itself ' (Ph: 223/362). From the moment Heidegger realized that being, as the event of the appearing of beings, could not be identi¢ed with the human world (after Being and Time in 1927), his work pursued a subterranean thought of nature, as that unintelligible, inhuman element, crucial to this event. The insistence of nature in Heidegger's thought is signi¢ed ¢rst by the intrusion of the notion of `earth' in 1934. This was Heidegger's ¢rst serious attempt to think the relevance of nature to the appearance of the phenomenon and hence to phenomenology in general. The problem constantly faced by his thought is how to relate to this nature from within our human perspective without appropriating it. Heidegger never left phenomenology, even to the extent of pursuing a `phenomenology of the inapparent'. He never ¢nished laying out the lines along which the event of manifestation unfolded, adding to world and earth the bisecting pole of man and god, who would later become mortals and divinities. Again, an inhuman element is added to the human, and the human relegated to one corner of the process of manifestation, removed from its centre. The four arms of the fourfold should be understood as the lines of perspective within which a historical world takes shape. Indeed, this perspective, governed by the respective relations assumed by these four elements, de¢nes each world in what it is. Today, the gods are dead, and world prevails utterly over earth. The world is the human world of techne, and the earth is physis, that nature upon which techne labours and upon which it relies. The vectors meet at a certain point in the distance, the `vanishing point' towards which all lines of perspective run, and from which they originate. This origin of the event of manifestation is, I am proposing, the real which existed before history began, before the happening of the manifestation over which human beings keep watch. And it is by writing the `fourfold' that Heidegger attempts to anchor this process of revelation in this pre-historical real, which we should perhaps call `nature' as a set of unintelligible temporalities which man is largely unable to bring within his ken. But `nature in itself ' falls outside of manifestation altogether, it is an origin which withdraws from our world as the unintelligible aspect of everything that appears to us. It is the thing in itself. To put this in terms of the fourfold: earth is nature insofar as it appears within the human world, but the very origin of the two interlocking oppositions of man and god, world and earth, is that point

Introduction

3

extraneous to all four, and which we propose to understand as `nature in itself '. Heidegger is thus attempting to delimit the conditions for thinking `nature' outside of its oppositional determination with respect to culture: nature not as the non-cultural, but nature as it is in itself. If this is the case, then are we not justi¢ed in interpreting Heidegger as attempting to situate the very origin of history, the beginning of human culture, when it uprooted itself from nature, thus beginning a nihilistic history which results in today's overwhelming of nature by technology? This is the ancient question of man as the bearer of techne, who exists in contrast to nature as physis. The question of being would then be the question of how techne could originate from physis, since it would be a question of how the event of manifestation, the appearance of a signi¢cant human world, could ever have occurred from out of pre-human nature. Thus my hypothesis amounts to the statement that the question of being cannot be distinguished from the question of nature and culture. In order slowly to open up the possibility that this might be the case, it is necessary to bring to the fore and take absolutely seriously, perhaps more seriously than ever before, those aspects of Heidegger which have come to be considered most dated, above all by Derridean deconstruction. We are speaking of the quaintness and rusticity of the `thing', the pastoral, the homely, the local: in general, everything which for Derrida seems to involve a stress on gathering and proximity.1 But this is precisely a proximity to nature, and a proximity which takes its mark from the technology which has today reached a hyperbolic point at which it appears to be an entirely self-sustaining circuit of energy which no longer even admits its dependence on the natural material that it mercilessly exploits. Heidegger is never so simplistic as to urge a mass abandonment of the city and a return to nature, but rather insists on the necessity, in the face of nature's occlusion by contemporary technology, of reinstalling the opposition between town and country, culture and nature. It is crucial that there exist a reminder of man's dependence upon nature, and this memory can be sustained in the country in a way that it cannot in the town. Above all, the forgetting of this dependence is the reason why the threat of destruction hangs over culture's head, and the very event of appearance itself, the human world, is under sentence of death. This is revealed today in the cries emitted by nature at the moment of its utmost occlusion, in what is called the `environmental crisis'. It is indeed a critical, which is to say decisive moment, but it is not just our human environment that is at risk, it is the environment of every animal on the planet, and indeed it is the environment of no-one, but nature itself that is at stake. It is precisely this shift, from protecting nature for our sake, to protecting nature for its own sake, that Heidegger forces us to think. Heidegger held from the very beginning, in the context of the failure of a tool, that it was only at the limit, when something stopped working, that it revealed itself. Later, when Heidegger began to think history, this logic dictated that

4

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

when something was on the point of absolute destruction, it ¢nally showed itself, as if making one last desperate struggle to be heard. This is what we are witnessing today amidst the ever growing devastation, to which so many still seem able to close their eyes, as it does not impinge too directly on their cosy, secluded worlds. It is precisely these eyes that we are called, ethically, to prise open. It is the revelatory character of the event of the destruction of nature that we are to insist upon, until it has revealed every last thing that it can reveal. This means going as far as showing up not just the economic system upon which the destruction is based (capitalism), but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, the technology which has made it possible (and ultimately, a manner of revealing beings as a whole which is given to us and which Heidegger names `Gestell '). This means not resting content with any half-measure in the politician's response to the crisis, but constantly insisting that the deepest issue has not yet been addressed. It is clearly not enough to believe in a non-destructive form of capitalism, but it may not even be enough to rid ourselves of capitalism altogether: this is why Heidegger considers communism and capitalism at certain times to be in essence the same, just as totalitarian and democratic governments are. This is because communism still thinks nature only insofar as it serves human ends, as a source of energy, freed from its exploitation by a certain class. Its freedom would be the freedom of the individual to derive energy from nature, without labouring to produce the means for it to be exploited by someone else. It would not attempt to think nature in any way other than an anthropocentric one. To think of technology ^ insofar as it is a response to the revelation of beings as energy ^ as the fundamental problem involves forcing critical thought to reconsider man's place within nature, the very relation of techne and physis, and therefore physis itself. It means refusing to allow it to remain in the realm of techne and to pursue merely human emancipation, without considering the possibility of unchaining nature for its own sake. In this way Marxism is to some extent embedded in a wider history of metaphysics, of which it remains unaware, since one never sees from the inside that in which one is complicit. This is to begin to take absolutely seriously Heidegger's attempt to remove man from his high estate as `lord of the earth' to the humbler position of `shepherd of being' (LH: 252/162). To guard over being is to ensure that its light is not snu¡ed out, and that means not only to watch over nature and combat its destruction, but also to ensure that the revelatory character of the destructive event is not forgotten and is indeed borne ever more ¢rmly in mind. `The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power [Rettende] begin to shine and the more questioning we become' (QCT: 35/36).

Nature beyond Opposition How are we to de¢ne nature in itself ? Can we? Can we think it at all outside of the opposition of nature and culture? What would it be? Whatever can grow

Introduction

5

(and perhaps even exist) without man's help? What could have existed even if man never had, and what will remain when he is no longer? Heidegger points out that Aristotle and the entire history of philosophy which came after him think nature privatively with respect to culture (cf. Ph: 195^8/324^8). Nature is thought analogously with the artefact of human culture, but as one which does not require making: ` ``growing things'' are interpreted as artefacts that make themselves' (Ph: 195/325). In other words, nature is understood as culture but without man, objects of arti¢ce which do not require his impetus in order to produce themselves.2 Nature is something which grows without being grown. And if we consider events within a su¤ciently large timescale, we must take this `growing' to include the folding of the earth's crust and the dispersion of the galaxies and the stars. Heidegger will then address the question of how we can think nature beyond its appropriation to the human in this way. Perhaps at this stage all it would be prudent to say is that nature can be de¢ned only as what is beyond the appropriative opposition of nature and culture. And perhaps this beyond is what Heidegger will have sought all his life. This is the place of the event of being, the di¡erence between beings and being, the event of their di¡erentiation, which `event' (Ereignis) was the guiding word of his thought. If beings are the factual entities of nature appropriated into man's world, and being is this world of culture, where are we to situate the event if not in nature, a nature beyond this opposition?3 Something must occur in pre-human nature which produces the very opposition of nature and culture, beings and being. But why do we give this place to nature? Because the opposition as such is a product of culture. An opposition is a mutually exclusive duality in which each half is de¢ned solely by the absence of the other. The oppositional relation as such cannot exist in nature since it presupposes the `trace' which marks the absence of one half in and as the presence of the other. Thus any understanding of nature which situates it within an opposition is a cultural understanding. It views nature from the point of view of culture. Thus it seems clear that to address what is properly other than cultural we need to address that which lies outside this opposition, and since this is the opposition which founds all oppositions, outside of opposition as such. If the realm of opposition is the realm of human culture, and if human beings are incapable of speaking and thinking otherwise than oppositionally, then nature in itself must be an absolute past and absolute future with respect to the realm of culture. When the human order did not exist and when it is no longer, there is nature. It is the absolute other of history. This de¢nition is not without its presuppositions. After all, Derrida has identi¢ed the trace which we are taking to characterize the human order as present within nature itself. Hence he refuses to understand the relation between nature and culture as a clean break. And yet, as we shall see, there are alternative approaches, and indeed ones which, quite apart from the possibility that they have a greater theoretical integrity, better allow us to respond in the most extreme terms to the current crisis, from out of which the present work speaks.

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Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

I am thinking of the Lacanian psychoanalytic approach: here it becomes clear that while the human being does indeed exist on an evolutionary continuum with the rest of nature, a genuine novelty does nevertheless emerge with the arising of homo sapiens, and it is precisely related to the trace and the signi¢er: language. And the same novelty may be found in Marx, where the realm of exchange becomes entirely independent of the realm of nature from which it nevertheless emerges. In the course of this work I shall attempt to demonstrate that Heidegger's approach is more akin to the Lacanian than the Derridean position. This in turn will answer another of deconstruction's common criticisms of Heidegger, that his stress on the human and its uniqueness presupposes an oppositional limit between man and all other animals which for biological, anthropological and simply logical reasons cannot be supported.4 The main reason for questioning this approach is in order to address and most e¡ectively to challenge the excessiveness of the human realm of techne, which has today assumed the most dangerous form of technology. Dangerous not because it threatens its own perpetuation, but because it threatens the extinction of both culture and nature, and even `nature in itself ' beyond this very opposition. This is why we are entitled to speak of an `excess', because one half of an opposition is threatening not only to occlude the other, thus destroying the very opposition itself, but even to over£ow this oppositional structure and destroy that nature which exceeds it. It is hard to see nature in itself being capable of such selfdestruction, which itself suggests that the opposition of nature and culture is not theoretically invalid. Thus, perhaps paradoxically, it is necessary to remove man from nature in order to defend the latter against man's predations, when it might have seemed more natural to place man within nature as one of its parts and to remind him to live harmoniously with the whole. But this risks appealing only to his narcissism, and reducing the protection of nature to his protection of himself. Such a troubling of the di¡erence between physis and techne does not allow us to identify and condemn the excessive quality of technology which is at the root of today's crisis. The course of the present work represents Heidegger's questioning of the possibility of addressing a nature that would exceed the opposition of nature and culture, and asks whether or not this very notion requires us to take Heidegger's thought away from its deconstructive `critique'. In precisely those things which deconstruction renders most obsolete do we ¢nd the most e¡ective means to confront the apocalypse of nature.

The Structure of the Present Work Chapter One demonstrates the emergence of the question of nature in the chronological development of Heidegger's work. It shows how this emergence is concomitant with Heidegger's thought of the thing (das Ding). The thing is

Introduction

7

shown to be a trace of nature which indicates the human world's dependence on something which remains unintelligible to it ^ nature in itself, which must therefore exist in the world as a void. I demonstrate how Heidegger comes to realize that any thought of the manifestation of beings must take into account the natural constitution of things. Chapter Two then takes the thing as a trace of nature within beings as a whole and shows how it forces us to consider the diachronic dimension of the emergence of culture from nature. I show that in Heidegger's discourse the thing opens up the possibility of explaining the chronological emergence of being from beings. This amounts to the anthropological question of the arising of the human being. This alternative dimension suggested by Heidegger's thing is opened up by juxtaposing Heidegger's discourse with Lacan's psychoanalytic notion of `the thing', which he does not fail to connect with Heidegger's. If Chapter One traces the chronological development of the thought of nature in Heidegger's work and Chapter Two is concerned with the dimension of diachrony which this opens up beneath the question of being, Chapter Three remains entirely on the synchronic level. This is the level which elides the question of chronological genesis and is thus the plane of a traditionally philosophical or systematic approach. It demonstrates, from the standpoint of Heidegger's later work which was reached at the end of Chapter One, how the necessity of the thing can be deduced without attending either to the past of Heidegger's work or to the past of the human race. This demonstration is carried out by contrasting Heidegger's later work with a thinker who believes that the event of manifestation can be explained without presupposing the void in the whole which the thing constitutes: Emmanuel Levinas. In order to explicate certain of Heidegger's later insights, we here ¢nd it necessary to align his thought with the psychoanalytic understanding of the signi¢er. Underlying each of the preceding three chapters is the understanding of Heidegger's `world' developed in Chapter One. This is the world understood as a collection of signi¢ers. This allows me to compare Heidegger with Lacan in Chapter Two and to align his thought with Lacanian psychoanalysis in Chapter Three. In Chapter Four this alignment is called into question. Here an anthropocentrism implicit in psychoanalysis is highlighted and the question raised as to whether the site of the manifestation of being is most properly to be located squarely in the human subject. I show that this was indeed the case in early Heidegger, where being was limited to the human `understanding of being', but that in later Heidegger the event occurs within the natural `thing' and that man's only role is to ensure that possible sites for this event are not altogether destroyed. In Chapter Five this question is extended to a consideration of Marx and the humanism of which Heidegger accuses him. At stake is the necessity to ensure that the natural crisis be taken to reveal all that it possibly can reveal. We must ensure that any political action which is urged as a result of the dawning of the crisis does not fall short of what that crisis reveals. I urge the hypothesis that a revolutionary aggression against the mechanism of capitalism is more likely to

8

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

proceed from a response to the natural crisis than from the solely human cause of the emancipation of the proletariat, if only because capitalism has grown strong enough to quell any proletarian discontent, but cannot continue to exist without its natural `fuel'. In `On the Jewish Question', Marx indicates the limiting nature of the pursuit of political emancipation and calls for a more fundamental human emancipation (JQ: 103, 105). I in turn present Heidegger as calling for an emancipation still more fundamental. Perhaps the emancipation of both nature and techne from technology.

The Form of the Present Work Opening up Heidegger s insights in the form of a series of encounters with other thinkers has a number of advantages. It forces us to explain what Heidegger is saying by compelling us, for the sake of a comprehensible communication with the other thinker, to translate his words into a less hermetic dialect. Without this explanatory translation one risks becoming a mere `scholar' and one's work a mere attempt to point up the internal coherence of a thinker's discourse. At the same time, it is perhaps the case that without these other thinkers it would not have been possible to ¢nd in Heidegger's texts certain insights which may reveal themselves only to an elliptical glance, such as we cast by following the trajectory of these other thinkers and tilting Heidegger's towards them. Each of these encounters, with Lacan, Levinas, Z­iz­ek, and Marx, attempts to describe the same thing ^ nature and culture, world and earth, world and thing, the thing as trace of nature ^ but each from a di¡erent direction, chronological, diachronic, synchronic, ethical, political, each new perspective gradually delimiting the object of our discourse more precisely, and gradually introducing new insights into the one topic at hand.

Z­iz­ek Taking Heidegger beyond deconstruction is little more than unfolding the approach to his thought proposed by Slavoj Z­iz­ek. It is Z­iz­ek's proximity to Heidegger, together with his persistent critique of deconstruction and deconstructive politics in particular, which has inspired this book. The gesture we make here, which attempts to interpret Heidegger's later insights in Lacanian rather than Derridean terms, is analogous to the founding gesture of Z­iz­ek's work, which was to move beyond the deconstructive discourse theory of Laclau towards Lacan (cf. Z­iz­ek 1990). Not that I am simply proposing an identity between Heidegger and Z­iz­ek. Indeed, beginning in Chapter Three and particularly in Chapter Four, I ¢nd it necessary to shift Heidegger's thought away from psychoanalysis and draw it a little closer to Laclau. The question at stake here is whether the human being is the privileged site in which the truth of the present age manifests

Introduction

9

itself. This is how Heidegger is usually understood, and insofar as Z­iz­ek follows Marx in asserting the primacy of class struggle above all other struggles, the latter would also be compelled to say that it is in the proletariat that the truth of the contemporary situation reveals itself. But my contention, which I propose as a possibility for discussion, for the sake of polemic, to prevent uncritical consensus, is that the symptom (in the psychoanalytic sense) of the contemporary age appears in the guise of nature, insofar as it is ¢nally manifesting its inhumanity in its growing protest at man's incursions. Man's task is only to be open to that which is revealed in such events, and to promulgate the message that they bring as widely as possible. What is required is not a moderation or compromise, but an exacerbation of this extreme. Since, as Heidegger above all insists, it is only at the limit, at the extremity, that something is revealed. Thus we are called, ethically and politically, to insist on the absolute extremity and exceptionality of the current crisis, on the natural apocalypse as the most telling, and to change the way human beings exist in the most fundamental manner.

Chapter 1

The World and the Thing: Of Signi¢cation and Nature

From `the World' to `World and Thing' In this chapter I trace the development of the notion of `world' from Being and Time in 1927 to `the Thing' in 1950. Since in early Heidegger `world' is identical with `being' this is to trace out the development of what Heidegger meant by `being'. It is to demonstrate how Heidegger alters his understanding of the ground and event of being, which is to say appearance. In Being and Time (1927), the world is understood as a totality of signi¢ers. Heidegger's theory of world is a theory of the way in which such a thing as signi¢cation comes about. However, following Being and Time, Heidegger found his understanding of signi¢cation to be inadequate and was compelled to supplement `world' with the notion of `earth'. This happens for the ¢rst time in `The Origin of the Work of Art' (1936). In Contributions to Philosophy (1936), world and earth are joined by gods and men to form the two interlocking oppositions, world and earth, man and god. Finally, these four are renamed `earth and sky, divinities and mortals' in `The Thing' (1950) and collectively named the `fourfold' (das Geviert). This fourfold in its totality is then understood as that which makes `world' or signi¢cant appearance possible. This fourfold is always instantiated in a singular being which Heidegger names a `thing'. Thus, all along we will have been tracing the development of the notion of `world' and thus of the very nature of `being' in Heidegger's thought. Here, at the end, Heidegger demonstrates that signi¢cation can be understood only by way of the conjunction of world and thing. Being presents itself only in singular instances, since it is the very singularity of beings. Being is singularity. And it is this singularity alone which makes signi¢cation, signi¢cant appearance, possible. But this singularity is bestowed upon a thing by its being rooted in nature, and nature is precisely what Heidegger's early notion of world remained independent of. It understood nature solely insofar as it was taken up into the human realm of means and ends, the `ready-to-hand' world. This is why there is nothing like singularity in Heidegger's earlier notion of world, nothing like a `thing'. By respecting the natural material from which it is made and upon which it depends, the thing is the negation of the mass-produced instrumental beings of the human world.

The World and the Thing

11

The addition of the thing to Heidegger's early notion of world anchors this world in nature. The addition of natural `earth' clearly indicates this re-rooting. By stressing this, one can make explicit the fact that Heidegger's thinking of being is a theory of signi¢cation in the sense of a theory of the process by which signi¢cant appearance, the signi¢er, emerges from nature: this process is what Heidegger calls an `event' (Ereignis). Heidegger's whole project thus relinquishes its earlier anthropocentric approach to being and its relation to nature, and is allowed to develop into an insistence that what is ethical is precisely to ensure that the human world ^ beings as a whole as they appear to man ^ does not lose touch with the nature that underlies it, an eventuality which technology brings before us. Thus we begin from a position which remains metaphysical, by con¢ning nature to the dichotomy of nature and culture, and, by following the chronological unfolding of Heidegger's work, we come to a non-metaphysical point, which attempts to make room for a `nature' which would stand outside all opposition. It is only here that a proper attitude towards nature can be conceived. Indeed, this is why we are following Heidegger in our pursuit of the best way to ensure the conservation of nature. If the thing is a being which remains in some way connected with its own natural constitution and thereby ties the world of culture back to nature, we must pursue the path that leads from world to the thing. What does Heidegger mean by `the thing'? The thing appears only late in Heidegger's life but it is not possible to understand it or the necessity for its introduction if we do not ¢rst examine his early phenomenological work in and around Being and Time. The thing can be understood only by taking into account the chronological development of Heidegger's thought from 1927 to 1950 by way of all the stages which we began by distinguishing. In order to reach our goal, we must ¢rst demonstrate that Heidegger's description of the world amounts to a theory of signi¢cation and the world a totality of signi¢ers. Appearance is always signi¢cant appearance, at least for the early Heidegger. His phenomenology is an attempt to explain how the phenomenon as such ^ the `appearing' ^ comes about, how appearance comes to appear. This very appearance is `being' (Sein). This approach will provide us with a new way of bringing to light the `metaphysical' presuppositions that haunt Heidegger's early work, which will in turn allow us to delineate metaphysics itself in a new way. It will also show that Heidegger, like Frege, Husserl and, later, Derrida, was concerned to delineate a distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung. For what is Heidegger's question? It is the question of the meaning (Sinn) of being. Being, or world, is signi¢cance (Bedeutung), and Heidegger's quest is to ¢nd the ground of signi¢cation, the Sinn of Bedeutung, and the process by which they relate to one another. Signi¢cance is grounded in (its) meaning. As a result of the metaphysical presuppositions which Heidegger found to infect his early approach, his manner of formulating this question changes, and he comes to focus not on the ground but

12

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

on the very process of this grounding, which is the event of manifestation itself, the event of being (Ereignis). Thus Heidegger's quest for grounds becomes a thinking of the nature of the event. By taking this chronological route through Heidegger's work we shall also see that Heidegger's later thought by no means exceeds phenomenology. It is rather a necessary development of phenomenology, which sheds its last metaphysical residues. It will always be an account of how appearance appears and how the manner of this appearance varies across history, and how this variety should a¡ect our dwelling upon the earth, our `ethics'.

Provisional De¢nitions In what context does Heidegger's analysis of world emerge? In an inquiry into the meaning of being. This is precisely an inquiry into being's ground, into how such a thing as being is possible. If being is `appearance' then Heidegger's question is Leibniz's: `why is there something rather than nothing?' How did it come about that beings appear to us? Since we are at the beginning, we must try to speak as simply as possible. We shall not provide axioms for what is to follow, since these reduce thought to the technical application of rules, to a `formal logic'. But we shall supply preliminary de¢nitions in order to help orient the reader as they alight on this di¤cult terrain. Such de¢nitions can only be peremptory. Their justi¢cation or otherwise can be established only by the reading that follows. But any reading requires that one have some prior understanding in order to ¢nd one's bearings in the text and gradually re¢ne this understanding through reading. Meaning (Sinn) Meaning is that which allows a phenomenon to be intelligible to us, it is the ground of intelligibility. It makes intelligible appearance possible. Since all phenomena are intelligible, meaning amounts to the very condition of the possibility of all beings. Meaning makes possible the `being' of beings. This does not of course mean their mere subsistence, which can take place in the absence of meaning, but their `be-ing' towards an entity which can receive them, their appearance or presentation, their signi¢cance for us (human beings). Being (Sein) Being is signi¢cance. Because beings are signi¢cant they may be deemed `signi¢ers'. If meaning makes beings possible, then meaning makes signi¢cance (Bedeutsamkeit) possible. If beings appear in a signi¢cant way then being (Sein) is signi¢cance, the signi¢cant way that beings appear to man. Being is the signifying of beings.

The World and the Thing

13

The Meaning of Being (der Sinn von Sein) The meaning of being is `temporality'. The meaning of being, which may also be called its `ground', is human ¢nitude, man's temporary nature or `temporarity' (Zeitlichkeit). It is only because a certain being (man) is ¢nite and hence singular that beings can appear at all, that being as appearance can exist. The brevity and uniqueness of each human life is itself made possible by the actual facts of birth and death which set limits to the beginning and end of this life, thus rendering it ¢nite. World (Welt) World is a totality of signi¢cation. It is the way in which intelligibility (VerstÌndlichkeit) or meaningfulness in general appears to man, always articulated into the conceptual form of individual signi¢cations (Bedeutungen). Since being is also signi¢cation, at this point in Heidegger's trajectory, being is world. Being always appears in the form of di¡erentiated beings. There is no being without beings, as in the metaphysical myth which understood man and temporal entities as a `fallen' version of something greater which could exist independently of them. What a theory of signi¢cation needs to explain is precisely this articulation of meaning into signi¢cations, Sinn into Bedeutungen, and Heidegger explains it on the basis of human temporarity. Thus, he explains how the meaning of being (temporarity) produces being (signi¢cance). The analysis of world, therefore, must say why human ¢nitude is necessary in order for there to be signi¢cant appearance. Thus the theory of world is a theory of signi¢cation, or a theory of the event of being. Meaning becomes signi¢cance because man is ¢nite. Sinn articulates itself into distinct Bedeutungen because man has a death and a birth which absolutely limit the beings which he can survey, thus de¢ning his span as a limited and a unique one, situated at a certain point in space and time. Heidegger's question is: how do we get from actuality to signi¢cance? How can an actual fact about mankind (his ¢nitude) give rise to something of another order, signi¢cance? How does `senseless' matter give birth to sense? Why is there this moment of lighting in which beings fold back on themselves and become apparent to themselves at a certain site within them? If man's ¢nitude is ultimately a fact then Heidegger's theory of signi¢cation must answer the question of how possibility ^ the signi¢cations or uses that actual beings can possess ^ issues from actuality. Actuality and possibility are two radically di¡erent ways of being, so one can already see the immense and indeed abyssal chasm that Heidegger will need to traverse if he is to explain how the latter arises from the former. Later on, Heidegger found this di¤culty to be insurmountable if formulated in this ^ in truth, metaphysical ^ way. As a result, he discards the words

14

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

`meaning' and `signi¢cation'. He will however retain the word `world', but the theory of how world comes about will be greatly complicated, to involve ¢rst `earth' and then the fourfold `thing'. One cannot leap straight to the later work in which these terms ¢rst appear and assume that it will be immediately intelligible, since it is only the problematic nature of the early work and the terms in which it poses its question that dictate the shape of the later work. We cannot simply de¢ne `earth' and `thing' without a detour through Heidegger's early understanding of `world'. How then would we be able to understand the `world' which the fourfold itself invokes?

Metaphysics An explanation of why signi¢cant appearance emerges is precisely what Heidegger ¢nds lacking in traditional metaphysics. Beings as a whole have been given various signi¢cations throughout history; each amounts to a certain characteristic that every being is said to share insofar as it is a being: beings must be instances of ideas, emanations, created beings, subjective representations, matter, will to power, and so on. These characteristics will be understood as the being of beings, which characterizes all beings as such. Thus, being is understood as the `most general' characteristic of all beings. Heidegger calls the activity which proposes such signi¢cations for beings as a whole `metaphysics'. Metaphysics amounts to an attitude which can take many forms, from a scribe's ontological text to the founding of a state, or the functioning of technology. All of these, in their very attitude to beings as a whole, can be `metaphysical'. They take up a stance towards beings as a whole (ta physika) as if they stood outside of it (meta). Heidegger sees everything metaphysical, insofar as it is metaphysical, to be lacking, de¢cient in a certain way. His task is to understand what makes such attributions of signi¢cation possible, by seeking the meaning that underlies and uni¢es them. He resurrects the old Aristotelian question of the unity of the many signi¢cations of being. What is it that uni¢es all of the di¡erent words which we apply to being? What justi¢es our describing them all as ways of `being'. When viewed from the perspective of its end and exhaustion, the metaphysical tradition can be seen to provide answers to the question of what being is that are never de¢nitive. The determination is always changing and di¡ers radically across epochs. Thus metaphysics is historical, without wishing to be. What Heidegger seeks is the ahistorical ground that has allowed any such thing as a determination of beings as a whole to take place. What was it that allowed metaphysicians to think that they could survey beings as if from a point beyond the whole? What are the presuppositions of metaphysics that it should attempt to de¢ne `beings as such and as a whole'? For Heidegger, metaphysics, by its very nature, could never properly have attended to this, since

The World and the Thing

15

metaphysics as such is made possible by its ignorance of these presuppositions. In other words, the tradition which always prided itself on lucidity and clarity was a certain form of blindness, a blindness with regard to its own (im)possibility. But this is not just a question of what makes the metaphysician's `abstract' theorizing possible but a question of what makes appearance as such possible, since in order for the metaphysician to name beings as a whole this whole must have appeared to him. And it can be shown ^ as Heidegger does ^ that beings as a whole have appeared radically di¡erently over the course of history. Metaphysics (which means philosophy) is perhaps not distinguished by any great insight, but by the fact that it explicitly thematizes, which is to say, lays out systematically how beings appear to that particular age. This is why Heidegger studies philosophical works and no others, save poetry, which alongside philosophy o¡ers an alternative apprehension of how the whole appears. If with regard to today's world, Heidegger analyses events that actually occur ^ war, technology, the atom bomb ^ this is because for him philosophy as such is no longer any di¡erent from technological activity taking place in the world, in that both are now absolutely blind to the presuppositions upon which their activity rests. This is why so much uncritical twentieth-century philosophy voluntarily enters the service of natural science, and why Heidegger's engagements with English philosophy can be counted on the ¢ngers of one hand. Philosophy believed itself to have stopped doing `metaphysics' with Nietzsche. But now it merely partakes in calculation, classifying and ordering beings which are revealed to it by the natural sciences. It claims to have abdicated its metaphysical ambition. Heidegger ¢nds technology itself in its very extremity to be more revealing of the contemporary moment than the humble but bitter philosophy which remains its docile standard-bearer. If it is to make statements regarding the totality of beings, metaphysics must assume this totality to be actual, it must actually exist, and a human survey of this whole must be possible. If beings are to form a totality then the totality must have a border. There must be a place outside the totality which marks its limits and so de¢nes it as a totality. It cannot merely be a possible totality, as an in¢nite universe would be. In order to be determined `as a whole' its totality must be actual. And the actuality of totality is guaranteed by the existence of god, as creator, sustainer, or actual beholder of this totality, who stands outside the totality and thus ensures that the totality is a totality. `God' names whatever is capable of occupying a point outside of beings as a whole, outside of space and time, bodily corruption and ¢nitude: the subsistence of a totality is ensured only by an exception to this totality. Metaphysics is the divine aspiration of man that seeks to survey the totality of beings and de¢ne them as if from a point beyond the whole, `meta ta physika', `beyond beings as a whole'. For man is situated within beings, he is himself a part of them. This is precisely what metaphysics does not see, it is the metaphysical blindness. Thus it does not see that by attempting to survey beings as a whole it is hubristically adopting the extraneous position of a divinity. This is what Heidegger, in his privileged position at the end of a history of metaphysics, can demonstrate

16

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

metaphysics to be: blind to the metaphysician's own situation within beings as a whole. In fact, contra metaphysics, it is only because man is himself a being, and an especially ¢nite one, that beings can appear to him at all. But this blindness means that metaphysics is also blind to being. For if metaphysics denies the ¢nitude upon which it rests, it cannot envisage such a thing as singularity. And this is precisely what being is: the singular appearance of a unique event. Each thing is unique, it will exist once only; this is what gives it its peculiar appearance. It is precisely this peculiarity, which is after all superlatively di¤cult to grasp and express, that metaphysics remains blind to. Thus, it remains oblivious to being (Sein). In order to break through its oblivion, metaphysics, in Heidegger's early understand, must be shown that it rests on man's ¢nitude, which is to say man's singular placement at a certain time and place within the whole. For it must blinded itself to the singularity of its own position, the uniqueness of its time and place, in order to make statements about beings as a whole `for all time'. It is precisely this grounding of each metaphysical position in the historical singularity of its moment, in spatio-temporal singularity (the space might be that of Greece, Rome, or Europe), that Heidegger's `deconstruction' of metaphysics brings to light. His phenomenology, his own positive theory, attempts to explain why this is so, why metaphysics, and appearance itself, must be grounded upon ¢nitude ^ and of necessity forget this ground. This is why deconstruction is akin to a `critique of ideology' since it demonstrates that and how any particular epoch or group must believe that its particular geographically and historically speci¢c views are valid in all places and at all times. Being is this historical and geographical situatedness, since it is only this situatedness that determines the way in which beings will appear during that epoch, and in that place. What determines the way beings appear, indeed this very way itself, is being. Thus, Heidegger's quest for the meaning or ground of being attempts to describe the route that leads from ¢nitude ^ man's ¢nitude in the ¢rst instance ^ to the appearance of being. If ¢nitude makes being possible, then this ¢nitude is the meaning of being.

From Being to Man Let us begin to unfold Heidegger's question of the meaning of being. This will let us re¢ne and eventually problematize the provisional de¢nitions we have provided. What is meaning (Sinn)? Meaning is the condition of the possibility of intelligibility, `that wherein the intelligibility of something maintains itself ' (BT: 193/ 151). It is the ground presupposed by intelligibility as such, and `a ``ground'' becomes accessible only as meaning' (BT: 194/152, my italics). A ground is a

The World and the Thing

17

screen `upon which something is projected' in order to be shown, in order that it might appear to us (BT: 194/152). What is being (Sein)? Being is the intelligibility (VerstÌndlichkeit) of beings; it comprises those aspects of beings which we are able to understand (verstehen). But since beings are di¡erentiated entities, so must intelligibility be di¡erentiated into individual signi¢cations. The signi¢cations of entities taken together compose `the totality of signi¢cations' (Bedeutungsganze), which is `the world' (BT: 203^4/161). Being is the world as it appears to man. What is being's meaning? Meaning in general is what allows an entity to become intelligibly present before us. But if being is intelligibility itself then being's meaning must be that which makes intelligibility possible tout court. What is capable of doing this? Heidegger's answer is temporarity (Zeitlichkeit). With this word, `temporarity', I am attempting to express the brevity of man's life and, due to man's ability to relate to this brevity, the uniqueness of this life. Man is `rare' since his life occurs only in isolated instances.1 Man is not only temporary, but rare:2 hence `tempo-rarity', the rareness of temporariness, which is always the rareness of an entity that is temporary. Unlike the animal, as metaphysics understood it, man is not more species than individual, his death only con¢rming the irrelevance of his individual entity. His death gives him as an individual a unique importance, and responsibility. Temporariness means that any particular stretch of existence will be temporally limited and the only one of its kind that will occur for that particular existence. Each time, this being will belong solely to this entity, and in fact this entity, as a self-identical substance, is nothing besides this self-belonging or selfhood. Therefore it is senseless to ask whether a certain entity could, by any means, ever come to own another existence, since each eruption of existence is just this unique event of belonging or `mineness' ( Jemeinigkeit). My own belonging is absolutely con¢ned to this particular stretch of existence that I am currently unfolding.3 And this by de¢nition. This temporarity is the ground of being. This explains why Heidegger tells us that `a ``ground'' becomes accessible only as a meaning, even if it is itself the abyss [Abgrund ] of meaninglessness' (BT: 194/152, my italics). Thus meaning, according to a logic which Heidegger will often invoke, extends as far as meaninglessness, which would be the zero degree of meaning. Thus we are required to think in an entirely novel way: the meaning of being, which metaphysics led us to believe was something grand, even divine, is in fact meaningless, something lacking. The ground of being is an abyss: concretely this means that the ground is not something more substantial than that which it grounds; it is of a di¡erent kind and so presents the appearance of bottomlessness. Finitude is meaningless. It has less meaning than it bestows; metaphysics always assumes the ground to have more. But this does not explain the origin of that particular quality or essence which the ground bestows: it only presupposes it, and presupposes it as possessed to an eminent degree by the ground. Heidegger's task is

18

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

therefore to expose this presupposition and to show how the reverse can be true, how something like a surplus can be generated from out of poverty. Being is perspectival apparition, it is the very manner in which beings approach us and present themselves, always in a historically and geographically speci¢c way ^ a way that depends upon our contingent factual situation within beings as a whole. We may say therefore that being is the very fact of perspective, since the notion of perspective implies the viewer's4 being situated within the ¢eld that appears. For this reason, being is premised upon an entity that dwells within beings and to whom these beings consequently appear in a certain perspective. Perspective implies a ¢nite ¢eld of vision, one bounded by a horizon. Something must con¢ne the possibilities which man's understanding is able to `comprehend' within this horizon. The absolute limits of understanding are set by the facts of birth and death, which guarantee each man's temporarity, his absolute limits. Thus, being is an always perspectival event of appearance. This event will always be limited and so determined by the horizon imposed on each human being by their birth and death. Thus man's ¢nitude is the `meaning' of being. Thus does appearance rest upon the ¢nite entity that is man. We have progressed from a phenomenon to its conditions. We have performed a transcendental gesture, which always reveals conditions where a phenomenon appeared to be unconditioned, `merely given' or factual. Now we must show how Heidegger explains the process that leads from this condition to that which it conditions. We have seen the ground of being, now we must witness its event. How does man's ¢nitude actually bring about appearance?

From Man to Being For being to exist, an entity which belongs to itself must rise up amidst beings as a whole. This entity will form the orienting centre of a horizon, for only by being limited can a ¢eld of signi¢ers come to signify: otherwise, the potential meaning of the signi¢ers expands inde¢nitely. Man understands that he has been born and that he is to die. He understands that his life is ringed around by two facts over which he has no control, two `nullities' which make themselves known in the `guilt' (Schuld ) of which conscience reminds him.5 Thus, man's existence is stretched out towards the void in both directions: the void opens up in beings only with the arising of man. Man's relation to the two ends of his ¢nite life amounts to one being among the whole of beings inclining towards non-being or nothingness. Man's contingent emergence therefore produces a hollow in beings which dips towards the void. Beings which had previously known no negativity suddenly tilt towards the nothing, in the site of man's understanding. It is only thanks to this break in the plenitude of beings as a whole that the whole can come to re£ect on itself and achieve a certain self-illumination. This self-illumination or `awareness' is

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19

what Heidegger means by the `Da' (`there') of `Da-sein', being's being there, apparent at a certain site. Thus the nothing is precisely being. But all beings are ¢nite, by de¢nition. What gives man his privilege? Human beings have a particular relation to death. Death comes to every entity, but only in man's case does it cause him to re£ect.6 We are speaking ontologically: beings as a whole re£ect back on themselves here. Death causes man, who is part of beings as a whole, to fold back on himself and constitute a re£exive `self ': he splits into an `I' and a `me' and thereby comes to own himself. This is the event of belonging, the creation of a temporary ownership. We are given ourselves to own for the incalculably ¢nite span for which we will have existed. It amounts to the development of (self-)`under-standing' whereby the two parts of the self come to re£ect one another. In this re£ection, by a process that remains to be examined, appearance is produced. It is as if the in¢nity of two mirrors re£ecting back at one another were the origin of manifestation as such.7 In any case, in man's understanding of being (SeinsverstÌndnis), being acquires a location or `there' in which to appear. For this reason, man, insofar as he is this site in which appearance originates, is called `Da-sein', being's `there'. A `clearing' for being, a break in beings as a whole, is necessary in order for anything at all to appear ^ consider the dark forest suddenly illuminated as one emerges into a sunlit clearing. This clearing is circumscribed by the re£exive loop of man's selfhood, whose doubling back upon itself opens up a certain delay and gap within beings as a whole, which in turn makes room for light. This is the light of manifestation and the eruption of being.

Understanding and Possibility How more concretely does the event of self-relation produce appearance? It introduces a gap, the space between I and myself in which re£ection takes place. What was formerly pure actuality (Wirklichkeit)8 comes to possess possibility. Now that an entity has come to re£ect and is aware of such a thing as `the future', beings are not simply what they are given to be in their actuality or `presence-at-hand' (Vorhandenheit): they have possibilities, they can do things. There is, quite simply, more to them than meets the eye. Anthropologically speaking, how could man ¢rst acquire the ability to deploy tools? Actual beings must have appeared to him as having possible `uses' which were not currently being actualized. The object had to have become capable of something beyond its punctual reality. Re£exivity, the gap with respect to oneself, is the lapse required for `understanding', the `understanding of being'. For what does understanding do? It opens up possibilities: `the understanding has in itself the existential structure which we call ``projection'' [Entwurf ]' (BT: 184^5/145), `projection, in throwing, throws before itself the possibility as possibility, and lets it be as such' (BT: 185/145). Understanding is nothing besides these possibilities which it projects. `Understanding is the

20

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

being of such capability-of-being' (BT: 183/144). This means that the understanding is a sight (Sicht) (BT: 186/146) which sees more than just the presentat-hand actuality of a being. Understanding sees beyond actualities to those inactual possible uses to which that entity might be put in the future. Thus, the sight of understanding is `Umsicht', a sight which sees not the entity itself but its circumstantial uses: it is `circum-spection', it sees those possibilities which spread out around the actual entity (BT: 98/69).9 We shall see that these possibilities are the `signi¢cations' of an entity. This space around and between entities is precisely `existence'. When we say that man `exists' we mean that he dwells in the spaces between actualities, projecting open their possibilities. He is by no means con¢ned to the punctual actuality of his physical body, which includes his head. Insofar as man is Da-Sein, insofar as he is his understanding of being, of manifestation, he is nothing besides these gaps which open up around beings. For being is signi¢cation, it is the sum total of all signi¢cations that can occur at a single time and place. Therefore, being is these gaps, these spaces that have been prised apart between beings. Being is the interstices of beings.10 `Being is possibility' (CTP: 335/475, my italics). Thus when we speak of man's understanding as creating a hollow, we must be very careful not to con¢ne this hollow to the site of man's actual body. This is to understand man in his actuality and not in his capacity as the site of being, Da-sein, or possibility. Man's understanding is distributed in and as the spaces which separate beings, not in the everyday sense of literally creating a distance between them, but in opening up their futural possibilities, uses, which entities do not have insofar as they are considered only in their actuality. A use stretches from the present to the future. It is not encapsulated in any punctual actuality. It is something that involves a potential repetition. It may be occurring now, but it is inherent in a use that it may be repeated in the future, and need not be occurring now, in the present. These uses become available only to man's understanding. Thus it is only in man's understanding that possibilities open up around beings which were formerly con¢ned to their actuality. In this way man's understanding reaches out, ex-ists, into the world, and projects open gaps in beings as a whole, which gaps will comprise the world in the technical sense which Heidegger gives to it. Man's understanding thus opens up being, since being is `nothing' when seen from the perspective of beings in their positivity or actuality: `As that which is altogether other than all beings, being is that which is not. But this nothing essentially prevails [west] as being' (PWM: 233/101^2). It is by ¢nding himself related to the future in the absolute sense, a future which cannot be assimilated to the present ^ death as the absolute unknown ^ that man is opened to the future of things in the guise of their possible uses. Thus it is man's relation to death (and birth) which bestows upon him his understanding of being. Where the mesh of beings was once in¢nitely tight, man's understanding prises open interstices between beings, which individuate them from one

The World and the Thing

21

another. Man's understanding makes explicit their possible uses, the connections which can be made between them, the way one thing leads to another and one entity can work on another, can be used to make another . . . the way a hammer can ultimately lead to a shelter. And this amounts to bestowing signi¢cance upon beings. The name for the joints which then open up, for all of the possible links that run between beings, is world.11 The space of the world lies between actual beings, it comprises their very joints.12 In describing this world, Heidegger is therefore describing the way in which man's ¢nitude opens up being as the appearance of individual beings. Because man is ¢nite, his understanding opens up cracks between beings, and worlds form. These worlds describe the `being' of those beings which participate in them since it is by way of this structure that these beings ¢rst come to appear as what they are. This `as' is their very being. Being is what individuates entities, what makes them into the individuals that they are. It does this by spacing them out, distantiating them from one another. Without `space' between beings, projected open by man's ecstatic understanding, beings would not be individuated and so could not appear as individuals. These spaces are constituted by possibilities, they are routes linking tasks and ends. In other words, they are procedures which are not immediately actualized in the actuality of the being itself.

Present-at-hand Abstraction In fact, it is not su¤cient to describe possibilities as existing `between' actual `present-at-hand' entities since this might be taken to imply that such entities existed beforehand. In fact, the very notion of an individuated entity depends upon the network of possibilities. It is only within this network that an entity can be considered as an individual and therefore as an entity. Its place in a structure of signi¢cations de¢nes what an entity is. This network of possibilities de¢nes beings insofar as they are `ready-to-hand' objects of use, possessed of possibilities. The space of possibility is logically prior to the actualities between which it stretches and hence prior to the very opposition between actuality and possibility. This is often misunderstood by writers who ask after the relation of priority between the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand: the very `opposition' arises only after the ready-to-hand has emerged and is posited from its perspective. Once this has happened, the present-at-hand can be accessed only by way of an abstraction from the ready-to-hand. The status of the `present-at-hand' before the emergence of the ready-to-hand (and indeed the `hand' itself as the organ which grasps tools) cannot be determined. One can see the same logic at work in the relation between existence and factuality. Factuality (TatsÌchlichkeit) can be accessed only as `taken up into existence', where it is transformed into `facticity' (FaktizitÌt) (BT: 174/135).

22

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

But the mistake of thinking the present-at-hand to be prior to the ready-tohand is a necessary illusion. Heidegger describes it as an essential part of Dasein's being, `Verfallen' or falling prey13 to an illusion. The present-at-hand entity is simply a node in a network that logically precedes and de¢nes it. It is a material point upon which certain relations converge: it is something which merely ¢ts a place in a structure. One reaches the object of disinterested theoretical beholding, the present-at-hand, when one extracts this node from the world of possibilities. The present-at-hand entity is an abstraction because the ready-to-hand entity is a knot in the mesh where two or more possibilities conjoin to form a de¢nite entity that has a certain set of functions and relations to other entities and functions. It is only this place in the network which de¢nes the boundaries of the individual ready-to-hand entity and so individuates it. To isolate the knot by abstraction is to cut the entity o¡ from the structure that individuated it in the ¢rst place. When an entity is removed from this network, as it is when it fails to perform, to live up to its place in the structure, it becomes merely present-at-hand, the object of a detached observation. But it is clear that this present-at-hand entity is not what we encounter ¢rst, since without its network of signi¢cance it could not be individuated as the present-at-hand being that it is. Therefore, the disinterested observation of the present-at-hand ^ `science' ^ will never be able to explain why that individual is the individual entity it is, why its boundaries are drawn where they are, since this was determined by the links that surrounded it in the network of signi¢cance from which it has been abstracted. This isolation of the entity relieves it of all signi¢cance, reducing it to an empirical sensory particular. Thus, empiricism and sensualism are not innocent, nor their access to beings immediate; they are premised upon a prior abstraction. In this way things appear as ready-to-hand before they appear as present-at-hand. It is a question of individuation. A scienti¢c observation can consider the characteristics of matter but it cannot explain individuation. This abstraction has its e¡ects on language too. Those abstracted presentat-hand substances are named in language by substantives. Why after all is Heidegger's discourse on the world so awkward to read? Because he is engaging with the signi¢cance of the ready-to-hand from which a nominated substance is normally abstracted to become present-at-hand to a theoretical observation. This abstraction from the world amounts to a forgetting of being and the question of its meaning, its foundation in man's ¢nitude. This means that world is of necessity ignored by metaphysical treatises on the nature of beings. `Onto-logy' naturally focuses on to on, the entity. The world however is composed of those possibilities which lie between entities, an entity's `signi¢cance'. Hence Heidegger, in order to discuss the world, to bring it before his readers, is forced to create nouns from those words which ordinarily lie between nouns: prepositions and conjunctions. For instance, `the in-order-to' and `the for-the-sake-of-which'. Ordinarily, such prepositions and conjunctions withdraw into the background so as to bring the nouns and verbs to the fore: we pass over them as if

The World and the Thing

23

they were unnecessary. In truth they are the very structure of the text. Heidegger treats them as the main topic of the sentence, as if they were nouns, because the world, which is Heidegger's topic, is comprised solely of these links between substantives, and the only way to focus attention on these connections is to shift them into an unusual, uncanny position in the sentence. This shows that language in its ordinary use does not work, and failure to work is always revelatory: this is why Heidegger stresses that a tool appears to us for the ¢rst time only when it develops a fault. In this case, at fault is Western language, which does not normally allow one to nominalize prepositions. When a tool fails, one is left holding an inert actuality, frustrated of its possibilities, and what one wished to do appears glaringly for the ¢rst time by way of its very absence. Hence the di¤culty of Heidegger's language must not be circumvented if what is at stake in it is not to be missed.14 The words which fail to work fail as words. Thus they present themselves as present-at-hand, as objects of observation and dissection. Locutions like `the in-order-to' and `the for-thesake-of-which' require examination in order to be understood. They cannot simply be used, and so brushed o¡.15

World as Signi¢cance Let us then examine these curious words, which we have present-at-hand before us. The two most crucial elements of Heidegger's world are the `in-order-to' (Um-zu) and the `for-the-sake-of-which' (Worumwillen). The Um-zu comprises the possible uses of an entity, while the Worumwillen are the ends to which these uses may be turned.16 Since the sole location of possibilities is Dasein's understanding or existence, the end of all ends will be some form of Dasein's being. Rather than being an understanding of the world that is straightforwardly ontically sel¢sh,17 this simply means that possibilities always appear in the site of Dasein: we have already described Dasein's location as outside of itself, in the spaces between entities other than itself. Dasein is for this reason described as the ultimate for-the-sake-of-which (BT: 116^17/84). Possibilities of his being orient and limit the many possibilities which entities have, simply because he himself is limited and therefore situated within a horizon. Entities appear to have possibilities for him, such as he understands them. This is how things appear. We cannot do otherwise than see phenomena as turned to our ends.18 `In-order-to' (means) and `for-the-sake-of-which' (end) taken together form the structure of the world, signi¢cance (Bedeutsamkeit). `The relational totality of this signifying we call ``signi¢cance''. This is what makes up the structure of the world' (BT: 120/87). What are signi¢cations (Bedeutungen)? They are the ways in which the entity as a signifier points (deuten) towards the ends to which it can be put and towards the other entities which its use might involve: these pointings are

24

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

themselves the possible uses of an entity (cf. BT: 120/87, be-deuten). These pointings span the intervals between beings and constitute each being's possibilities. Signi¢cations are not properties that pre-existing actualities accrue but are the possibilities which constitute the very being of entities in their `readiness-tohand'. The readiness-to-hand or possible usefulness of an entity constitutes its signi¢cance.19 Since these routes run between entities and de¢ne their signi¢cance, we may say that ready-to-hand entities are di¡erentially de¢ned in their signi¢cations with respect to all other entities in the same world. This is why Heidegger speaks of the world as a `relational totality' (Bezugsganze) (BT: 120/87). A totality is necessary in order that the possible uses of an entity are not unlimited and its signi¢cations inde¢nite. Without a limit on signi¢cation there can be no meaningfulness at all. Beings appear as what they can do but are not necessarily actually doing. So, appearance is possibility, not actuality. Being is possibility as such. It is therefore signi¢cance, that space of possibility which allows an entity to partake of a world: without it, we would have only an inapparent `actual' universe, a fragmented empiricist scattering of meaningless shards.20 Being is the `gathering' gesture which structures beings into a signi¢cant (historical) world. How does Heidegger describe the construction of a world? The production of a world is an `articulation' of undi¡erentiated intelligibility into individual signi¢cations which together form an articulated whole. It is a process that Heidegger names `Rede' (discourse).21 This describes the way in which meaning is always already translated into a plurality of signi¢cations. In other words, it describes how signi¢cation comes about. If the meaning of being is man's ¢nitude, then it will explain how this ¢nitude, this relation to the void, brings about signi¢cant appearance.

Rede Discourse (Rede) is an articulation of meaning. `Discourse (Rede) is the articulation of intelligibility [VerstÌndlichkeit] [. . .]. That which can be articulated [. . .] in discourse, is what we have called ``meaning'' [Sinn]. That which gets articulated as such in discursive articulation, we call the ``totality-of-signi¢cations'' [Bedeutungsganze]' (BT: 203^4/161). Recall that meaning is `that wherein the intelligibility of something maintains itself ' (BT: 193/151). Meaning is the ground of intelligibility. Thus we begin with meaning; insofar as this gets articulated, placed in a di¡erential discursive structure, it is intelligibility. Intelligibility is articulated into a totality of signi¢cations or world. Thus the meaning of being articulates being as intelligibility into beings as signi¢ers. Discourse is that which ensures that being is articulated into beings, articulation here in the twofold sense of being split up into a di¡erential structure and spoken in language.22 Discourse then, which we ordinarily think of as a noun, a ¢nished product, is here being thought as a process of articulation.

The World and the Thing

25

Heidegger tells us that this articulation takes two forms: mood (Stimmung) and understanding (Verstehen): `Discourse is existentially equiprimordial with stateof-mind [Be¢ndlichkeit]23 and understanding' (BT: 203/161). Meaning is experienced as signi¢cance by mood and understanding, which together comprise the complete structure of our experience and thus the entirety of appearance as such. Moods present us with actuality, understanding with possibility. Possibility is created by understanding, while actuality is passively received by mood. Understanding is our freedom with respect to the future, mood our passivity with respect to the past, since we ¢nd ourselves always already given this or that mood. The world must have a horizon, beyond which we can neither see nor go. Naturally, this limit to possibilities is provided by actuality and more precisely that actuality which limits our horizons absolutely, whichever way we look: death, along with birth. That we were born in a particular circumstance, and that the time given to us in which to change these circumstances is limited, enrings us with an absolute horizon. We have already described how understanding teases out possibilities, but if this is to constitute a world, which means a totality, this dispersal of possibility must ¢nd its limit somewhere.24 Death and birth together absolutely limit our possibilities of understanding. Why? Because we have no power over them. They are facts. Hence, because it is given limits in this way, the set of signi¢cations form a totality (Ganze). Actuality sets a limit to the spreading of possibilities that constitutes the world: hence there is an absolute outside to being (signi¢cance) as possibility, in the form of facts. And this is what moods reveal: `The facticity of being delivered over' (BT: 174/ 135). This is because moods are that aspect of experience over which we have no power and which we cannot understand: even if we can rationalize our way out of a mood, we cannot rationalize our way out of our very endowment with moods. This is a consequence of our ¢nitude. To be delivered over is to be factually landed with ourselves, as we were born, at a certain time and place: death, by rendering our life an unrepeatable event, tethers us to our birthplace, our locality in beings as a whole, temporally and spatially ^ our birth therefore cannot happen again nor our birthplace and circumstances be radically altered. In some sense, it is always already too late for us. Only an acknowledgement of this will let us work out our most `authentic' possibilities. Death and birth thereby allow us to project only a limited range of signi¢cations for the world we inhabit. These facts make of our world a ¢nite totality and so ¢x the signi¢cations of those beings which lie within it, preventing their possibilities from multiplying into in¢nity. Thus, man's understanding makes signi¢cation possible, while his moods present us with that which makes it actual, by putting us in touch with the limits of the understanding's projection. Being thus amounts to the given possibilities of entities at this unique historico-geographical time and place.25 Rede dictates that meaning is not unlimited and so incomprehensible, but horizonal, since limited by our actual situation.

26

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

The Sign However, this theory of signi¢cation will not satisfy Heidegger for long. In order to lead us into the problems which this theory of signi¢cation encounters, let us examine one signi¢er in particular, the sign (Zeichen). In the sign, the chief di¤culty of the theory is concentrated, since the sign wishes to do something that should be impossible: to join actuality and possibility. The sign is an actuality which signi¢es possibility. The problem is that, as it stands, the actual present-at-hand entity is attained only by abstracting from the ready-tohand structure. This means that real entities, apart from their signi¢cance, are in their nature entirely excluded from the signifying network. It operates autonomously of them. There is an unbridgeable gulf between material things and signi¢cant things. The sign does not signify in the same way that other signifying entities do. It does not refer to another signi¢er, as every other ready-to-hand signi¢er does: `A sign is not a thing which stands to another thing in the relationship of indicating' (BT: 110/80). Rather, it signi¢es possibility as such. It signi¢es (a certain area of ) signi¢cation. A sign stands for an entirety of signi¢cation. Thus the sign introduces a doubling within beings. Such a re£exion always creates illumination: `establishing a sign can, above all, reveal' (BT: 111/80). Generally, the positivity of actual entities elides the fact that they are signifying ^ because signi¢cation is possibility and not actuality ^ but a sign is something whose very actuality is to signify: it has no other use than to signify the usefulness of others. Signs signify signi¢cance. A sign makes apparent a certain region of beings in their normally implicit signi¢cance. The width of the region it can make apparent is proportional to its own meaninglessness. The less it presents itself as having an inherent use or signi¢cation of its own and the more it empties itself of meaning, the wider the realm of signi¢cation it can stand for: `The wider the extent to which it can indicate, the narrower its intelligibility and its usefulness' (BT: 112/81). This opens up the possibility that there is a sign which is so empty that it could signify the whole world. What signi¢es the whole world is man.26 Man is that entity which quintessentially lacks all qualities of its own, but whose very existence opens up the signi¢cation of the whole world. He acts as a sign signifying all other entities: this is part of what it means to be `being-in-theworld'. We have seen that the place in which Da-sein exists, the territory in which his understanding roams, lies in the spaces between entities, marking out the routes of signi¢cation. Man's very existence is to dwell entirely within the spaces between beings, his understanding projecting them open. The sign opens up the possibility of signi¢cation as the spacing out of entities. Thus, man expresses the dilemma of an entity which embodies both being and beings: this was his `ontico-ontological privilege' (BT: 32^5/11^15). It is the hyphen in this expression that goes unthought in Heidegger's early work: how are being and beings related to one another in one entity? Heidegger begins by stressing their absolute separation, but this leaves him unable to explain their

The World and the Thing

27

relation. How can actuality and possibility relate if one begins by presupposing their absolute scission? Readiness-to-hand is normally implicit, since our understanding is given to understand beings in their presence-at-hand: presence naturally elides absence. `The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-tohand, it must, as it were, withdraw [zurÏckzuziehen]' (BT: 99/69). Or rather, we are usually not explicitly understanding at all but merely acting. For this readiness-to-hand to emerge we `require some ready-to-hand equipment which in its character as equipment takes over the ``work'' of letting something ready-tohand become conspicuous' (BT: 111/80).27 This implement fails to function as a ready-to-hand entity should and has no use of its own: one does not use a sign as one uses other implements. `[A sign is] an item of equipment which explicitly raises a totality of equipment into our circumspection so that together with it the worldly character of the ready-to-hand announces itself ' (BT: 110/80, italicized in the original). `A sign to mark something indicates what one is ``at'' at any time. Signs always indicate primarily ``wherein'' one lives, where one's concern dwells, what sort of involvement there is with something' (BT: 111/80). Wherein one lives is one's `world'. The sign brings world to the fore, in just the same way as a faulty tool or an unusual locution: the signpost provides us with a `world-map'. The revealing example Heidegger gives of such a sign is `[t]he knot which one ties in a handkerchief ' (BT: 112/81). It is a pure signi¢er in that it signi¢es only that there is something to be signi¢ed. It is a pure reminder. It calls to mind. But what? Only that there is something to be remembered. The example of the handkerchief is chosen for its inherent meaninglessness, the very inde¢niteness of its signi¢cation. The knot could mean anything. The more senseless the sign is, the fewer possibilities of its own that it presents, the freer rein it gives to understanding's projection. The sign is an actuality which situates itself where possibility should be and thereby makes explicit (the place of) signi¢cation. It is an entity, a present-at-hand actual entity, which is planted in being, in ready-tohand possibility. Thus it marks a moment at which, impossibly, the signi¢er is joined to the non-signi¢er, culture to nature. The sign is an actuality which somehow comes to instantiate possibility itself. Heidegger tells us that `[a] sign is something ontically ready-to-hand which functions both as this de¢nite equipment and as something indicative of the ontological structure of readiness-to-hand [. . .] and of worldhood' (BT: 114/82, italicized in the original). One is quite lost when one comes across a sign on the wayside: an incongruous artefact obtrudes from the meaningless natural landscape. Suddenly everything makes sense, one's environs take on a certain signi¢cance. It is the sign's obtrusive actuality which allows it to indicate signi¢cance itself, to bring signi¢cance into being. By being explicitly meaningless, explicitly present-at-hand, the sign indicates the fact of signi¢cance, that there is a way to go. It indicates the fact that signi¢cation was there already but was implicit: it could not have been entirely absent since in that case the sign ^ which is genuinely

28

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

without meaning ^ would not have appeared any di¡erent: `the sign itself gets its conspicuousness from the inconspicuousness of the equipmental totality' (BT: 122/81). The sign is a substantive which places itself in between substantives. It occupies the place of the ontological di¡erence between being and beings. It is a representative of being within beings. Heidegger's own linguistic signs are of this nature, attempting to indicate ontological characteristics with ontic words. The question which the early Heidegger is unable to answer is just how such a thing as a sign can exist. How can being make its presence felt within beings?28 How can something other than beings be spoken of? This implicates the whole of Heidegger's discourse. Heidegger cannot fully explain the process which links ¢nitude with manifestation, man with being, a being with being itself. The two sides of the ontological di¡erence fail to join up and so are precipitately shortcircuited, as becomes evident in the notion of the `sign'. Let us specify why this is the case. We shall see that it reveals an unspoken presupposition of Heidegger's approach. It concerns man.

The Problem with the Early Heidegger Man, the metaphysician, is internal to beings. He is situated. To this extent, Heidegger opposes metaphysics. Rather than allowing man an external viewpoint on beings as a whole, he situates man within the whole. But this does not mean that for him there is no position outside of all beings, meta ta physika. Man is not the meaning of being. His temporarity is. This temporarity is a result of the limits given to man's life by birth and death. These events are facts, natural facts. Being is possibility and its meaning is an actuality. In other words, the ground of being dwells absolutely outside of being, lacking all signi¢cance. The fact that there is something external to beings allows them to form a whole, since it provides a limit to their possibilities. The presupposition that beings form such a totality is precisely the presupposition made by metaphysics. For this reason, despite Heidegger's anti-metaphysical gesture, his understanding of being's ground still allows one to speak of beings as a whole. Despite his intention to abolish the theological viewpoint, it nevertheless haunts his early work. It is no longer the man-god who stands outside of beings, but the facts of nature which are man's birth and death, natality and fatality. An unheard-of ground, to be sure, a negative ground or abyss, but a ground nevertheless, with all the (metaphysical) problems this brings with it. Man's ¢nitude, as a natural fact, is situated by Heidegger outside the world of culture. It thus acts as an external, transcendent ground of this world. It makes it possible. What Heidegger fails to see is that the ¢nitude of man could and must be understood as a certain part of the whole itself. If ¢nitude is itself one element within a whole, then the whole itself cannot be complete. There is a de¢ciency in beings as a whole themselves. This removes the perhaps too sharp

The World and the Thing

29

distinction which the question of being drew between nature and culture. It is not as if nature is entirely left behind when the signifying order has formed. As we shall see this is precisely what Heidegger intends to convey by his invocation of the `thing'. One removes all trace of metaphysics by adhering to the following criteria: 1) ¢nitude should not belong solely to man, and 2) ¢nitude should not be separated from the ¢nite being and placed outside of the whole but should insert a gap into beings themselves, a place in the structure of the world which is left empty. As it stands, the void is placed by Heidegger outside of beings. For a totality to be a totality it must have an absolute outside, separated from the inside by a perfect border. This is the role that human ¢nitude plays in guaranteeing the totality of beings as a whole: it sets an absolute horizon to the spreading of possibilities. To assume that there is such an outside, as Nietzsche was the ¢rst to recognize, is to remain metaphysical. It is not to make ¢nitude absolutely original, but merely the incomplete view of a whole that is in itself complete and hence presupposes an originally in¢nite non-situated intelligence as an ideal: this is what Sinn grounded, and why the language of Sinn must be eradicated. As Heidegger admits, in his early work, temporarity is an Urfaktum (MFL: 209/270), a grounding fact that admits of no further explanation: it is a metaphysical substantia, standing at the basis of his entire edi¢ce. It is this fact which allows Heidegger to believe that there is such a thing as a totality ^ `beings as a whole' ^ every element of which would have a speci¢ed meaning. In other words, even if metaphysics denies man's situation in the pursuit of its aim, this aim is justi¢ed,29 it is still possible to attribute a signi¢cation to beings as such. This means that all beings can be made intelligible to man. Being refers only to intelligible appearance: everything that is must be intelligible. The way Heidegger was forced to realize his mistake was not directly to see that he was assuming an external point of view on beings, but by the insistent intrusion of an apparition that was not intelligible. This thing was `nature', the elements and the animals which reared their heads in Being and Time but were temporarily subdued. They remained leashed throughout 1927 and into 1929^ 30, but it would not be long before they came to strain so ¢ercely they were let slip. It is `nature' that leads Heidegger to introduce the notion of `earth' and thence the `fourfold' or `thing'. World is not simply world, but involves earth, and ¢nally comes to hinge upon the thing.30

Nature, Matter, Earth The slow growth of the tree, the folding of the earth, the lifetime of the stars, impossible to comprehend within our ephemeral existence, impossible to `identify' with or assimilate to ourselves and our own minute duration: these things appear to man and yet remain unintelligible to him. This fact began to

30

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

impose itself on Heidegger as early as 1926, in Being and Time itself, where it is acknowledged that the truth of nature is captured neither by presence-at-hand nor readiness-to-hand. Any encounters which we have with nature can only appropriate them into man: `Only in some de¢nite mode of its own being-inthe-world can Dasein discover entities as Nature' (BT: 94/65). Which means that the world can only appropriate nature as raw material for its own ends: `Here, however, ``Nature'' is not to be understood as that which is just presentat-hand, nor as the power of Nature. The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind ``in the sails'' ' (BT: 100/71). And even if we consider nature apart from its ready-to-hand properties in a `scienti¢c' manner as presence-at-hand, we shall not reach nature in itself: `If its kind of being as ready-to-hand is disregarded [. . .] the Nature which ``stirs and strives'', which assails us and enthrals us as landscape, remains hidden' (BT: 100/71). In other words, nature in itself lies outside of the opposition of ready-to-hand and present-at-hand. If we were to understand nature as present-at-hand, merely as an abstraction from the humanized world of the ready-to-hand, we would still be appropriating it to human intelligibility. Heidegger is thus already broaching the possibility that nature in itself eludes us and our system of oppositions altogether. In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, one year later, Heidegger will say more explicitly that this is how we are to understand nature, as an absolute exteriority to human oppositions, as an absence which somehow achieves a certain kind of `presence'. It is only if we wish to uncover it that we take it up as the present-at-hand and place it in an opposition with the ready-to-hand: the opposition of `nature and culture'. Nature in itself falls outside of this opposition. `Intraworldliness does not belong to nature's being [. . .]. Intraworldliness belongs to the being of the present-at-hand [Vorhandenen], nature, not as a determination of its being, but as a possible determination, and one that is necessary for the possibility of the uncoverability of nature' (BPP: 169/ 239^40). Thus, although Heidegger appears to want to ¢nd a place for the unintelligibility of a certain natural appearance, he is at the same time tempted to render it inapparent, and to con¢ne its appearance to the appropriated form of the present-at-hand. If we want to actually disclose nature, it will have to be in a worldly way. Heidegger perhaps says as much in the following: `What is not in need of being produced [nature] can really be understood and discovered only within the understanding of being that goes with production' (BPP: 116/163). In other words, physis must be appropriated to techne if it is to appear. Interestingly, very early on, Heidegger numbers those things which are `in' the world as `houses, trees, people, mountains, stars' (BT: 91/63), at least three of Heidegger's later examples of an inhuman nature that is entirely incomprehensible to us. How on earth could stars be incorporated into the world as the early Heidegger understands it? And yet even this is not so implausible: from very early on, the stars were used as navigation aids, and even to determine the fate of mankind. Human appropriation knows no limits.

The World and the Thing

31

In any case, Heidegger here seems to suggests both that nature can be apprehended only in its humanized form as ready-to-hand or in present-at-hand abstraction and that this can only miss nature as it is in itself, which ^ on the whole ^ must remain absent. In other words, man and his world can only exclude nature, which escapes the very di¡erence between meaningful and meaningless, and even the opposition between being and beings. Nature in itself, we should recall, precedes all oppositions. But since world is all that appears, this would ultimately relegate the unintelligible to non-appearance. And yet nature, the unintelligible, does appear.31 Heidegger does not fail to see this: one might call it nature's `sublime' aspect, the appearance of non-appearance, `the Nature which ``stirs and strives'' ', as Heidegger has it from Goethe. The problem is that, as yet, Heidegger cannot account for this. Due to the absolute separation enjoined by the ontological difference, he does not yet have a way to explain the presence of absence, the existence of a void within the whole. The two, being and beings, must be kept absolutely distinct. If being is appearance, and if nature appears, then nature must be a being. Now, if beings as a whole were grounded on man's ¢nitude, being would exist only in man's understanding of being and any being qua being would be fully intelligible. But as we have seen, not all are fully intelligible. In which case we can infer that being ^ properly understood ^ must be based on some other ¢nitude altogether, and not man's. The fact that some aspect of being does not have a signi¢cation means ¢rst of all that being may not be identi¢ed with signi¢cance and that the ¢nitude which makes being possible is not the property of man but the ¢nitude of beings as a whole. Beings create their own horizon. There is something that escapes the whole and it is not man's ¢nitude. But there is nothing outside the whole since god is dead. Therefore this lack must somehow be internal to beings, and we must learn to think of the universe itself as inherently incomplete. Beings as a whole are missing something. They do not form a totality. The notion that a `being as such' exists is false. It is not just that metaphysics remains ignorant of its own foundations, its very premises are false, and its aim impossible to reach. `Besides beings, there is nothing' (WM: 84/3): this is what science teaches us, that discipline which has most joyfully danced upon the grave of the ontotheological god. In light of this one is compelled to admit that the same goes for being's foundation. That ¢nitude upon which being is grounded must also be situated within beings and not beneath them. As a consequence, beings must be inhabited by a void, an incompletion, a meaningless element, if they are to appear. For this reason, since being cannot be identi¢ed with signi¢cance, its ground can no longer be described as its meaning: even if this meaning is meaningless, it still thinks in terms of meaning. For this reason Heidegger comes to speak of being's truth, the event of manifestation based on no ground at all. Indeed, the very search for a ground is seen to set o¡ in a metaphysical direction. One must focus on the event, the process, the path that takes us from actuality to possibility, from matter to sense.

32

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

How does all this a¡ect Heidegger's understanding of the question of being as a question of the emergence of signi¢cation?

From Man to the Thing: Actuality and Possibility In early Heidegger the two things which made a totality of signi¢cation possible were both attributed to man. His understanding opened up the possibilities of beings, and his actual death and birth set a limit to those possibilities and thus totalized beings as a whole into a human world. Man's projection of possibilities is not problematic: what is problematic is the positioning of the actual limit to these possibilities. It remains outside of beings as a whole. Hence, actual ground transcends possible being, and transcendence is a metaphysical relation. So we may presume that the totalization of beings cannot be carried out by man's actual death and birth. Signi¢cation must be ¢xed, rather than allowed to expand inde¢nitely, and it must be ¢xed because appearance is to some extent coherent. Nietzsche derived only one consequence of the absence of a transcendent void: immanent positivity. In fact, the death of god is ambiguous and Heidegger is interested in holding open this ambiguity.32 The alternative inference is that there is a void but it is immanent. The lack of an absolute exterior to beings means 1) that the `grounding' actuality must be internal to beings, and 2) that the actuality is therefore unable to totalize beings and absolutely ¢x signi¢cance once and for all. Why? Because signi¢cations are possibilities and this actuality would be an impossibility that dwelt within the sphere of possibility. In other words, it is internal to signi¢cance but is not simply signi¢cant, and this distinguishes it from all signi¢cant beings. Just as the sign stood fast in the sea of possibilities, so nature will come to rage around the steadfastness of a cultural `thing'. The actuality will no longer be the condition of possibility of totality but will be that within the totality which allows the illusion of totality but at the same time prevents such a totality from ever ¢nally taking place. Thus Heidegger's theory opens to the possibility of true history, the epochal changing of the world. In early Heidegger, the externality of actuality to possibility left us with a Platonic chasm. This gap was located in man, in the way that his actual death and birth produced his existential selfhood: the di¤culty was pointed up in the unanswered question, how could such a `sign' as man exist? In other words, both of actuality and possibility are required to produce signi¢cation and Heidegger bestowed both of these upon man. Man is therefore a literal subiectum, he ¢xes the limits of what can appear and yet is himself a part of that appearance. He grounds himself, he is a `substance'. He straddles beings and their outside: this is his ex-sistence, stretching between actual birth and death, and in that stretch opening up being as possibility. Now, the problem would be merely displaced and not solved if one were to transfer both qualities (actuality and possibility) to an inhuman thing. Rather,

The World and the Thing

33

these qualities must be shared in a certain way between man and the thing. Crucially, the thing does not create possibilities for the ¢rst time, but forms the actual limit of possibilities. We shall argue that the thing does this by involving nature in the process of appearance. We have already suggested as much by indicating that although nature falls outside of the opposition of ready-to-hand and present-at-hand it nevertheless appears. The right of nature to appear shall reassert itself in the thing. Early Heidegger understood the actual limit of being as death.33 My postulation is that death in later Heidegger should no longer be understood as man's own. But why then should we continue to name this otherness `death'? Does this not bestow on it a certain propriety and intelligibility that would contradict its function as a limit to signi¢cation, an `other' that precedes the very opposition of signi¢cant (ready-to-hand) and insigni¢cant (present-at-hand)? If it is still understood as `death' then this is perhaps because man can only appropriate `otherness', and the only way such otherness becomes accessible to him is in death. We have said that this otherness is `nature' in itself, and we shall see in the following chapter that it is not simply birth and death but the way in which we are born and die that constitute the `natural' element which enters into the event of manifestation, at least for the early Heidegger. It is in being's dependence on birth and death as natural facts that nature enters the event of being. We shall therefore see in what sense being can be said to originate in nature. Perhaps we should say that birth and death are not themselves the void, but rather our access to it, the tunnel through which we glimpse absolute otherness. They shelter the void for a world in which voids grow ever more scarce due to the rapidly improving technological processes of actualization that labour to maintain constant presence. The existence of an entity such as man is still a necessary condition of the void, the incursion of nature upon signi¢cance: man's existence is still that `in-sistence' or reaching out into the void that Heidegger describes in the `Introduction to ``What is Metaphysics?'' ' (IWM: 284/203) and which refers to the reaching out of the arm of the fourfold on whose extremity man perches. But crucially, this death begins to be described by Heidegger with a certain anonymity, as a shelter or testimony of being. `As the shrine of the nothing, death is the shelter of being [Gebirg des Seins]' (Th: 179/171). Death is `the highest and most extreme testimony of Being [Zeugnis des Seyns]' (CTP: 200/284; cf. 163/230). The void no longer belongs to man. And it is to indicate this disappropriation that Heidegger invokes the word `thing'. Man is still the one for whom death presents itself: death happens only to man, just as Heidegger always thought that appearance reached out to him alone. But he now sees it impending all around him, in the things of the world, in the endangerment of natural things. It is not his own constantly possible death that impends over and egoistically obsesses him, but rather that death which actually occurs to him in the death of others and other things. Let us wager that the name for that to which actual death occurs is always `the thing'.

34

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

The Thing The thing would be an actuality that limits the possibilities of a world's appearance and marks its ¢nitude. Possibility would then be ¢xed by something that lacked all signi¢cation: this would at last overcome the metaphysical error of presupposing a resemblance between ground and consequence, taking the ground as a supreme form of the grounded (cf. HI: 80/98^9). The ground would not exceed the whole, but would dwell inside it. The thing is not an entity, nor is it being itself, since it is not a possibility but that which limits possibility: it is an actuality. But it is not something present-at-hand that would be reached only by abstraction from the ready-to-hand. It must be something like a trace of nature as that which precedes the very opposition of readyto-hand and present-at-hand, possibility and actuality. The thing is something which refuses the opposition of presence and absence and makes it possible: this is what Derrida calls `the trace', the mark of absence or absolute otherness within presence.34 Heidegger will evoke the notion of `event' or `Ereignis' to describe the origination of the di¡erence between presence and absence, beings and being. How does the thing indicate that nature which precedes the opposition of ready-to-hand and present-at-hand? By dying. In this way, it indicates the ¢nitude of the current revelation of beings as a whole, its historical and geographical speci¢city. What is ¢nite is not primarily man but the world as it appears to man. `Beings as a whole' are not whole, but incomplete, and thus susceptible of historico-epochal change in the manner in which they confront us. The thing is the condition of a meaningful world but at the same time ensures that this world is only temporary. The thing is a thing simply by virtue of being fragile and frangible. Perhaps the thing is actual but with a brittle actuality, one which can easily be destroyed, just as the sign was an actuality which signi¢ed only possibility. In the following chapter we shall interpret this transience as a result of the thing's remaining part of the growth and corruption of nature. After all, even in the case of man, do we not die because, for all our alienation, we are still a part of nature? Heidegger may appear to want to purge death of all such signi¢cations, but I do not believe that we can make sense of death or allow our theory the functionality of death, unless we invoke the natural fact that man dies and that there is death.35 We die because we remain attached to nature by an umbilical cord. The thing embodies deathliness as such, which ensures the constant possibility of a void in beings and therefore of a change in the event of manifestation. Being is the ¢nitude of beings as a whole, the possibility that an historical world will decay, and nothing more. This ¢nitude means that the whole could one day change the way in which it is manifest. The fact that such an empty place inhabits beings, that the whole is generated by an event, opens up the possibility that in the future the whole might change.36 Being is no longer general intelligibility, founded upon ¢nitude, but is itself the ¢nitude of intelligibility, the singularity of the beings that are given to us, a singularity which appears but which is not intelligible.

The World and the Thing

35

Conclusion It is man's relationship to the death of the thing that turns him towards the void. This void is ^ at least for the early Heidegger ^ the open space of man's existence, which stretches open the possible signi¢cations of beings. But the fact that this opening remains dependent upon an actuality, which is itself situated within the whole, limits these signi¢cations to those allowed by the natural constitution of the material one is working with. The material constitution of ourselves and the world de¢nes our `situation'. This is the way the thing `gathers' a world (cf. L: 200/22). We should not submit to the deconstructive criticism of the proximity and propriety which may be discerned in such words as `versammeln' (to gather). What we are speaking of is signi¢cation and an operation that ¢xes the relation between signi¢ers by orienting them around a distinctively insigni¢cant element. Crucially, being is not a `transcendental signi¢ed' (Derrida 1974 [1967]: 20¡.) that would preexist and ¢x the relation between signi¢ers and thereby ¢x their signi¢cation. Signi¢cation can be ¢xed because the order of signi¢ers is not entirely closed to the actual realm of nature from which it emerged. Perhaps this is what deconstruction is unable to think, approaching its questions as it does solely from the perspective of the signi¢er. The thing is the fourfold. One of these four is man, but he is no longer at the centre of things, he is no longer a foundation. There is no foundation: the thing is a part of the `world' which it gathers (cf. Th: 179/172). This is the point of Heidegger's description of the relation between the four as a whirling rounddance, the Reigen of Ereignis, and as mirror-play: the moment of illumination is carried out by the four's re£ecting each other and not within the gap of man's re£exive selfhood. Thing and world are situated within a relation which is not the relation between ground and grounded. Hence the language of ground becomes inappropriate and along with it the language of meaning. Thus man is no longer the place of being, the re£ection of the whole upon itself. He is but one element in the formation of a ¢nite event of appearance, the coalescing of a phenomenal world, in conjunction with the thing as a trace of nature, of which we can say only that it falls outside the opposition of `nature and culture'. The thing is de¢ned by world and earth, man and god: Earth and god are actualities in the sense of `matter', that absolutely inhuman stu¡ which acts as a limit to the possibilities of appearance. Nature and the divine are the two limits of man, and one should not suppose that for Heidegger the divine is the super-natural: as he points out, ` ``nature''. What was it once? The moment-site for the arrival and dwelling of gods, when the site ^ still physis ^ rested in the essencing of being [Seyn]' (CTP: 195/277^8). Man and world are possibility, the opening and stabilized form of signi¢cation. The thing binds man to the actuality of earth and god: it is a protrusion of nature and thus tethers his straying understanding, to ¢x signi¢cation.

36

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

Transition In this chapter we have examined the reasons for Heidegger's invocation of the thing, the ¢rst glimmerings of a reappearance of nature in Heidegger's discourse. We have found it necessary to deal with this emergence chronologically, in terms of Heidegger's own development, as he slowly ground away the imperfections of his early work. This approach has also allowed us to be introduced gradually to Heidegger's unique world, and the question of being. In the following chapter we shall investigate the way in which the thing presents an intrusion of nature into the world of appearance, and how this naturality allows the event of manifestation to take place. We shall show that `the thing' opens up the possibility of considering the chronological emergence of being, for this event must originate in nature. This will in turn allow us to explain more precisely how the thing is also the promise of a new world, a wholly changed order of signi¢cation: in other words, a sign of hope to be `fostered' (hegen) (cf. QCT: 33/VA: 37, BDT: 147/149). Perhaps this genetic, almost anthropological, approach is the only way to explain how nature is involved with being: because it begets it. In Chapter 3 we shall return to a fully synchronic dimension and examine the necessity of the thing irrespective of the chronological development of Heidegger's thought and even, if possible, of being's own chronological emergence from nature: this will be to return to the thing and establish its fully £edged philosophical necessity. But we are not at that level yet.

Chapter 2

Lacan and Heidegger on the Thing

We chose the cabinetmaker's craft as our example, assuming it would not occur to anybody that this choice indicated any expectation that the state of our planet could in the foreseeable future, or indeed ever, be changed back into a rustic idyll [eine Dor¢dylle]. (WCT: 23/53^4) Our reference to the Black Forest farm in no way means that we should or could go back to building such houses; rather, it illustrates by a dwelling that has been [einem gewesenen Wohnen] how it was able to build. (BDT: 160/162)

Introduction The world then is structured by signi¢ers. It is nothing besides the signifying references that run between entities which we consider to be `in the world'. Dasein's very place, the stretch of man's existence, lies within these signifying routes. Dasein exists in the interstices of being, his understanding prising open the space of di¡erentiality which individuates them and situates them within the totality of a sense-bestowing world. And yet how is one to explain the sign? The sign signi¢es signi¢cation itself. Does this not mean that the signpost will refer the entirety of signi¢cation back to that which does not signify? And should we not refer to that which does not signify as `nature'? We have shown that the aporia constituted by the `sign' in Being and Time issued in Heidegger's introduction of the notion of the thing. The thing rooted the signifying order in nature, over which it was once thought to £oat free. This is why the early Heidegger could ¢nd no place within appearance for nature as such, a place later granted to it under the name of `earth'. But if the thing is the remnant presence of nature within culture, and if culture has not always existed, does this not suggest a chronological dimension that the thing would open onto? Does it not invite us to think the chronological genesis of culture from out of nature? And is this thinking not somehow implicit in Heidegger's own work? Such is the hypothesis of the present chapter. The thing is a fusion of the nonsensical origin of sense and sense itself, it anchors the sign in nature and thereby orients and limits the possible signi¢cations which signi¢ers can possess. The thing is a remnant of a pre-symbolic

38

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

nature which is not fully interiorized by signi¢cance but remains a crucial part of the signi¢er, a void therein which cannot be made fully present. If this thing is a trace of nature, and nature as pre-historic precedes the realm of human signi¢cation chronologically, then the thing is a mark within the present of an absolute past, and indicates a moment at which human beings ¢rst arose from a space in which they did not always exist. It opens up the span of a chronological genesis of the system of signi¢cation. By marking a void to which no signi¢er can be adequate, it refers the order of the signi¢er back to that which is inherently impossible for it to capture: that which preceded the signi¢er tout court. Our thought has been opened to the possibility that Heidegger's notion of the thing indicates this horizontal dimension by Lacan's ingenious treatment of the same. At a crucial moment in his seventh Seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the moment of the emergence of the signi¢er from the real, Lacan invokes Heidegger's essay `The Thing'. He shows, by a consideration of the vase (by which he refers to Heidegger's jug or pitcher, der Krug)1 that, from the perspective of the present, the vase appears to be the earliest human artefact that can be found, the very ¢rst signi¢er. It is the ¢rst indubitable sign that human beings were present there and then. And this is because, for Lacan, human beings are de¢ned by their inhabitation of a fully £edged system of signi¢ers. For Lacan it is human arti¢ce, techne, which makes signi¢cation possible by producing signi¢ers, things, as the ¢rst elements of a signifying system. Thus it is the ability to use tools and produce things which de¢nes the human being, and precisely because it makes signi¢cation possible. In Heideggerian terms, this means that techne produces being,2 and that the notion of the thing, when read along the two axes delineated by Heidegger and Lacan respectively, opens up the possibility of thinking the chronological conditions of possibility of being itself. This allows us to understand being as part of a broader (natural) history, that of the emergence of homo faber, and thus the evolution of life generally; further, it embeds being in the evolution of nature itself, since nature is that from which the producer emerges and that upon which he works. The thing, by refusing to let the signi¢er forget that it depends upon natural material, shows that being is enmeshed in a set of wildly varying natural durations, from the time of the stars, the earth, and the trees, right down to the ever more £eeting durations of organic life. These durations constitute a set of rhythms with which techne must comply, or risk its own destruction.3 We shall therefore explicate the thing in terms of its chronological genesis as a result of human techne. If this approach is opened to us by Lacan's reading of Heidegger, we are justi¢ed in this juxtaposition by our demonstration in the preceding chapter of the identity of the world and the signi¢er: these were Heidegger's words. And Lacan says the same, but shows that this has implications which Heidegger's text is not closed to but which it does not always unfold to their fullest extent. Lacan spells out his notion of the thing with respect to the signi¢er, as a remainder of its origin, the last glow of its creation out of nothing,

Lacan and Heidegger on the Thing

39

while Heidegger spells out his notion of the thing in tandem with his notion of the world. We shall spell out the latter's more `philosophical' or synchronic approach in Chapter 3. As Heidegger's thought evolved, he developed a historical understanding of worlds: he realized that the world was not an ahistorical network of means and ends, but rather the manner in which the world appears to us varies epochally, as the way in which being is `sent' or `destined' (geschickt) to us changes throughout history. Indeed, for Heidegger, history can comprise nothing besides these events in which worlds arise and decay, and beings as a whole appear in a new way. Thus a theory of the revolutionary change of worlds is incorporated into his thought, which is often thought of as a `historicizing of the transcendental' but which in truth attempts to think beyond the empirical-transcendental divide which the ontico-ontological di¡erence too closely resembled. I shall argue that the thing is responsible for ensuring that this revolutionary change in world remains possible, even today. But the history of being also presupposes a prehistory and a moment of chronological beginning, when the ¢rst sending took place: at a certain time, man must have opened a void (or clearing) within beings in which this sending could arrive. This reference to the nothing from which the signi¢er arose proves that the signi¢er can return to nothing and be annihilated altogether, along with the human race. This possibility has for the ¢rst time come within reach of its own actualization due to the technology that has spawned the atom bomb and the impending catastrophe of nature. Uniquely at this moment, the signi¢er's dependence on nature, which has ever more swiftly been occluded over the past three hundred years and in truth by a history stretching back at least as far as Plato, may ¢nally be revealed in its dying moments. This is what a consideration of the thing can reveal, and this is why it is important to attend to the signi¢er's prehistory: it demonstrates the possibility of change, even to the radical point of the entire eradication of the world. Thus, without presupposing that the theories of Heidegger and Lacan with regard to the signi¢er are identical, we shall juxtapose their nations of the thing, which means to bring together a synchronic and a diachronic approach to the event of being. Later on, we shall probe the problems that face any such identi¢cation: these will centre on the relation between the human being and the thing. The stress which we lay on the thing will suggest that the human being is no longer the privileged site of manifestation, where the truth of an age shows itself. In Chapter 5 we shall extend this into a critical account of Marx's notion of the proletariat as the symptomatic point of the capitalist formation, and attempt to propose an alternative. In the following chapter, Chapter 3, we shall examine the thing from a philosophical perspective, from the point of view of its synchronic, systematic necessity as Heidegger sees it, before in Chapter 4 addressing the discrepancy between the largely diachronic approach of Lacan and the largely synchronic approach of Heidegger. This will reveal a subtlety which might not have come to light without this juxtaposition with respect to the precise roles of man and thing in the process of revelation.

40

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

Beginning from Nature We have said that Heidegger does not unfold the genetic dimension implicit in his account of the thing, but what evidence is there that he considers this dimension at all ? Towards the end of Being and Time, Heidegger speaks of the `ontic foundation' of ontology (BT: 487/437). Now, this may well be taken to refer simply to the human being who is taken as the exemplary entity from which to decipher the meaning of being. But the very fact that Heidegger ¢nds it necessary to approach being from a being already in a sense justi¢es our approach. And indeed, while Heidegger does later stress that his aim is to speak of `being without beings', this is just one side of his thought, the side which thinks the event of being itself in its temporo-spatiality (cf. CTP: 259^71/371^88). In fact, he often approaches being in the form of a singular entity, the `thing', be it a poem, or a jug, or even a unique thinker's work. Indeed one might say that after a moment in which Heidegger asserts the necessity of both directions of approach,4 very late on, he seemed to ¢nd that the only way to approach being was through singular beings: for being is nothing besides the singularity of beings. In truth, being is the event, the be-ing (transitive)5 of beings, the happening of their singular manifestation. It seems that by taking as his point of departure a fact about mankind, the fact that his existence is temporary, limited absolutely by his natural birth and death, Heidegger is basing his discourse on certain facts which exceed this discourse and cannot be derived from it. These are facts about mankind as an animal, a product of evolution, of nature. Thus, if Heidegger begins from this `ontic foundation', can we not say that Heidegger is inquiring after the facts about nature which cause being to emerge? These facts would be the very `meaning' of being, which is not meaningful, just as natural facts are not, meaning supervening on them only later. Heidegger realized that to ground signi¢cation on meaning was analogous to the gesture of metaphysics which presupposed god as a superessentiality guaranteeing the signi¢cance of the whole. But the meaning of being was not something richer than the signi¢cance to which it gave rise, it was not even akin; it was a contingent fact, the fact of man's ¢nitude. The meaning of being is a fact about man. Above all, in thinking being from nothing, ground from an abyss, Heidegger's toil was always to think the phenomenon in a way that began from something less than phenomenal. If one begins from something more, from Plato's idea as ontos on, which was more in being than the me on, one has not even raised the question of its being, one has merely presupposed it. This is why no thought of god as superessential can ever explain the emergence of man since everything to be explained has thus already been taken for granted. In order to explain the emergence of man together with the emergence of being, one must begin from less than man, and less than being.

Lacan and Heidegger on the Thing

41

And yet ultimately, to describe a natural fact as the `meaning of being' would be to remain within metaphysics. Hence, the shift in Heidegger's question from the meaning of being to the truth of being. But it should not be thought that truth merely comes to assume the place which meaning has vacated. Rather, a di¡erent way of thinking about the relation between being and its ground is broached, which takes the event of the di¡erentiation of being and beings as its starting point and guide. Thus Heidegger makes it clear that his thought was always seeking the event of the emergence of culture from nature, of signi¢cance from facts. In order to counter the metaphysical idealism of his earlier work, which presupposed such a thing as meaning to exist and to need only an articulation into the world of signi¢cant appearance, Heidegger e¡ectively became a materialist, in attempting to explain the origin of sense from a realm in which previously it does not exist: this is to explain the origin of sense from facts which precede sense. Thus Heidegger should be happy to admit that his discourse ^ at least, his early discourse ^ relies on certain facts which depend on other discourses to identify them, including anthropology and evolutionary biology, both of which are utilized and reinterpreted by Lacanian psychoanalysis. If Heidegger begins from certain facts about man, we shall need to be able to say what those facts are, and to determine them precisely, since they found his early system. And since he begins from man, we must begin with the science that studies the emergence of such a thing as man and indeed what it is, factually speaking (which means on the level of `science'), that distinguishes man.

Man's Natural Finitude Finitude is a result of man's nature. For man is by nature a de¢cient animal. To begin from man in this state, and to explain being on the basis of it, is to attempt what is sometimes called a `naturalistic' explanation. It is to begin from nature and describe therefrom the reasons why such a thing as human culture emerged from it. Man has for a long time been understood as a lacking being. Epimetheus is often regarded as the father of this view which conceives man as lacking with respect to other animals, the `featherless biped' of Plato's account.6 In other words, while the animal, in this case the bird, is naturally supplied with the covering it needs in order to survive, man is born naked, in need of clothes. And nor is this all, he also needs shelter.7 This very ontic need or lack is the only thing that allows Heidegger to understand man's world as composed of tools. On an ontogenetic level, man is born the most helpless of all animal young, unable to move, feed, or defend himself. He is born, as Lacan has it, `prematurely', before his brain is su¤ciently developed to coordinate the scattered limbs of his body and so to have a complete sense of himself as a whole. This body could then be controlled, mastered in its movements, and used as a tool for grasping and

42

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

compensating for one's innate de¢ciencies, or at least one's dependence on otherness in the form of nourishment, clothing, and shelter. Man's ¢nitude is a consequence of his actual birth and death. These two `ends' circumscribe Dasein's being as an existential stretching. These actual events of birth and death are natural facts. We are born, but we are born in a certain way according to our speci¢c di¡erence from other animals, and that is the way of helplessness. In a way this re£ects our similarly bereft state at the moment of our death: entirely without resource, and dependent on others, not in control of our own fate. There is for man always something outstanding, he is an incomplete totality, and conscience enjoins him always to remember this lack.8 Techne is perhaps the supplement of our incomplete nature. If the world is composed of tools then being may be said to arise as a compensation for an ontic lack. Our ¢nitude is our dependence upon nature, something other than the human realm of culture and intelligibility. So one must begin with nature. We owe it to nature that we are born de¢cient and that we shall die, however one construes factual death: as the gradual deterioration in the reproduction of genetic material, the limited muscular endurance of the heart, a certain change in electrical activity in the brain. And this natural de¢ciency leads to our dependence on nature in another sense, that of relying on it to supply provisions for our nutriment, apparel and housing. Now, it should never be forgotten that the art which introduces clothes and shelter depends on nature. It depends on nature for the material with which it works and for the materials out of which it constructs its tools. The subject and object of techne depend upon physis. We shall see the relevance of this when we come to consider the state of techne in the industrial age, the age of technology.9 At several points in his work, Heidegger indicates that physis depends on techne for its revelation. Nature can appear only once the ready-to-hand world has arisen and placed it in an opposition with itself. Thesis, another word commonly opposed to physis, is understood as the `positing' of nature, its being brought to a stand, given a solidity in de¢ance of the rushing elements that rage around it. [T]he Greeks call authentic artwork and art techne in the emphatic sense, because art is what most immediately brings Being ^ that is, the appearing that stands there in itself ^ to stand [. . .]. To put to work here means to bring into the work ^ a work within which as what appears, the emerging that holds sway, physis, comes to seem [to appear]. (IM: 170/122) Heidegger clearly has in mind Aristotle's statement in the Physics that there is a mimetic relation between physis and techne. Art completes and perfects what nature cannot bring to fruition by itself, or it imitates it.10 Given that mimesis is also understood to characterize man, and to characterize him by nature (kata physin) (Poetics: 1448b5^8), we should perhaps understand this to refer to the inherently prosthetic nature of techne in the case of man. In other words, it would refer to the fact that man is naturally de¢cient, featherless, and so requires techne in order to compensate.

Lacan and Heidegger on the Thing

43

If man is naturally lacking then his dependence on nature is his ¢nitude, and his especial ¢nitude. The animal dies, but for Heidegger there is something peculiar about man's death. My thesis will be that his peculiar attitude towards death is a result of the natural de¢ciencies bestowed upon him by his premature birth. This is a thesis we ¢nd in Lacan.

Heidegger and Anthropology I believe that the genetic, quasi-anthropological approach broached in this chapter is useful, if not absolutely necessary, in making more concrete what Heidegger meant by the event of manifestation. It is all very well to prove philosophically that a void is necessary in order for there to be signi¢cation. But it is another thing to render this apparent to `intuition'. It is important to qualify this approach as quasi-anthropological, because Heidegger was insistent from the start, and even more so in light of the interpretations of Being and Time that immediately followed its publication, particularly in France, that it was not an anthropology. Heidegger precisely opposed philosophical anthropology and the (sometimes Sartrean) interpretation that read Being and Time as a treatise on the human being. This was, as Heidegger always insisted, an illusion brought about almost entirely by the book's truncated state and an insu¤ciently synoptic view.11 In truth, man is stressed only as the gateway to being. Heidegger distanced himself from philosophical anthropology only because it implied that the description of man was the endpoint of his philosophical endeavour rather than the beginning. As a science, anthropology remained enclosed within its object, blind and indi¡erent to that which man opened onto, to which man's incompleteness or openness allowed entry: being. Thus our approach is only `quasi-'anthropological because man is not our primary concern, as it never was for Heidegger. We shall have to see whether, in the end, the early Heidegger's problems also a¥icts Lacan. We have appealed to the discourse of anthropology as that discourse which exceeds Heidegger's, and avowedly so, to illuminate the facts upon which Heidegger draws in order to explain how being emerges from these facts. Facts which anthropology unearths and explains regarding man's use of tools can hardly fail to illuminate Heidegger's own analysis of `tool-being', which is to say, his analysis of worldhood. In an attitude, such as deconstruction, which so often buries itself in minutiae, we should not lose sight of the fact that Heidegger is presupposing here that techne is quite essential to the human being, and to the human being as Heidegger understands him. If man did not use tools, Heidegger's existential analytic, which founds his thinking of being, would be impossible.12 Heidegger is happy to rely on this and perhaps must rely on it in his early work, where man remains at the foundation. Whether this is still the case later, when his focus shifts somewhat towards the inhuman thing, and to the event rather

44

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

than the ground of being, remains to be seen. Perhaps if his thought still rests on science it will not be the science of anthropology. But we need not stop here. Throughout Being and Time are hints that Heidegger himself is not indi¡erent to a certain prehistoric or anthropological dimension. Scattered here and there, in obscure corners, one ¢nds comments on the chronological dawn of man and his world, his earlier `closeness' to nature and progressive distantiation. Heidegger generally makes these remarks with the apparent intention of dismissing an imaginary interlocutor's objection or preempting a misunderstanding. But things are not quite so simple, even if this is in spite of Heidegger's intention. In the following passage, Heidegger refers to a nature which man cannot subdue but with which he must comply: Along with the public world, the environing Nature is discovered and is accessible to everyone. In roads, streets, bridges, buildings, our concern discovers Nature as having some de¢nite direction. A covered railway platform takes account of bad weather; an installation for public lighting takes account of the darkness, or rather of speci¢c changes in the presence or absence of daylight ^ the `position of the sun'. In a clock, account is taken of some de¢nite constellation in the world-system. When we look at the clock, we tacitly make use of the `sun's position', in accordance with which the measurement of time gets regulated in the o¤cial astronomical manner. When we make use of the clock-equipment, which is proximally and inconspicuously ready-to-hand, the environing Nature is ready-to-hand along with it. (BT: 100^1/71) Thus, already, Heidegger is approaching his thought of the thing by picking up on certain ready-to-hand objects which take into account certain natural features in the very manner of their construction. At the same time, Heidegger even seems to recognize something like an embryonic `history of being', for it seems that with the progress of techne into technology, an original intimacy with and responsiveness to nature are increasingly corrupted. In the following passage Heidegger roots this history in the prehistory of the very emergence of tool-bearing among `primitive Dasein': Everydayness does not coincide with primitiveness [PrimitivitÌt], but is rather a mode of Dasein's being, even when that Dasein is active in a highly developed and di¡erentiated culture ^ and precisely then. Moreover, even primitive Dasein has possibilities of a being [Sein] which is not of the everyday kind, and it has a speci¢c everydayness of its own. (BT: 76/50^1) The phrases `precisely then' (gerade dann) and `of its own' (seine, italicized) suggest a historical, indeed `anthropological', variation in the division of man between everydayness and `authenticity' (Eigentlichkeit). Thus, not only does Heidegger admit that the signi¢er is in a certain sense anchored in nature, but he also seems to be aware of the fact that this anchoring implies the historical ephemerality of

Lacan and Heidegger on the Thing

45

any particular human world. Heidegger suggests that with the development of human history man accrues additional layers of `self-interpretation': To orient the analysis of Dasein towards the `life of primitive peoples' can have positive signi¢cance [Bedeutung] as a method because `primitive phenomena' are often less concealed and less complicated [oft weniger verdeckt und kompliziert] by extensive self-interpretation [Selbstauslegung] on the part of the Dasein in question. (BT: 76/51) And again, Heidegger refers to a historical widening of the distance between man and nature, which one might understand to be constituted or complemented by this `extensive self-interpretation', a greater treasury of signi¢ers encircling him and dissevering him from nature: Comparison shows that for the `advanced' Dasein the day and the presence of sunlight no longer have such a special function as they have for the `primitive' Dasein on which our analysis of `natural' time-reckoning has been based; for the `advanced' Dasein has the `advantage' of even being able to turn night into day. (BT: 468/415)13 All of this, already in germ in 1927, before the thing or even the artwork had been explicitly thematized. If we now reside at the end of history, in the nihilism of the contemporary moment which understands and therefore hopes for nothing beyond its current constitution,14 then we have completed a history which began with the chronological birth of history, which was created, Heidegger would surely be forced to admit, with the emergence of man as a species. The birth of man is the birth of techne, and techne is what makes possible the nihilistic occlusion of the other. The occlusion of the other is made possible only by the elision of that which would promise a change in the current symbolic order: the thing. And the thing exists within the symbolic as a hint of nature, physis. In his Nietzsche lectures, Heidegger de¢nes the development of history as a series of alternations in the joint between being and beings, the one prevailing over the other (cf. NIII: 5/476). If we agree that being is made possible only by the emergence of man's techne, then we might well understand this as the prevailing of techne over physis.

Techne and the Signi¢er Let us then attempt to understand how techne was present at the beginning of the history of being, at the origin of the world of human culture, in order to ask the question of how to respond, at the end of history, to the ruination of technology. Signi¢ers are de¢ned solely by their di¡erences from other signi¢ers. Signi¢ers thus require di¡erence in order to be possible. They require a certain `space' to have opened up between entities: beings as a whole cannot be £ush with one another, they cannot be de¢ned solely with respect to themselves,

46

Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction

as self-identical or substantial. They must be de¢ned by their di¡erences from one another and nothing else, and this means by their place in a network of places. What is required in order for the signi¢er to appear is something like di¡erence. As Heidegger stressed, di¡erence means literally the bearing apart of things, dif-ference, dia-pherein, it refers to the way beings are torn apart and yet remain related: this is the meaning of the `stretch' of ex-sistence. Before such a thing as di¡erence, there was only plenum, a space entirely devoid of gaps. At least, this is the myth which the signi¢er necessarily projects. Before di¡erence, things were indi¡erent to one another and there was no possibility of comparison: without man there was no measure. In order for di¡erence to be possible, a void must be introduced into the real. This is what techne does: it hollows out beings as a whole. Above all, this insight is what Lacan brings out in his masterly reading of Heidegger's `thing': that techne opens a void in the real. And this is the precondition of such a thing as di¡erentiality and the signifying order. Thus it is man's capacity to make, to arti¢ce, that initiates the symbolic order as the order of the signi¢er. Thus techne is what makes being possible, chronologically. Because, after all, there must have been a moment at which being ¢rst arose from nature, and ^ at least for the early Heidegger as well as for Lacan ^ it must have happened with the arising of man, as he came to assume his erect posture.

Lacan's Thing In his seventh Seminar, delivered in 1959 and 1960, Lacan launches into an extraordinary discussion of a notion he inherits from Freud: das Ding or `the Thing'. Things are not what they seem. It seems as if the thing is the very ¢rst signi¢er to be created by human culture, the mark of the absolute beginning of the signi¢er. But perhaps this moment is a myth created by the signifying order itself, in order to distinguish itself absolutely from nature. The Thing Lacan begins with a fundamental distinction: the thing is not an object. Thus he refers to `the Thing insofar as it is distinct from the object' (SVII: 111). The Thing will be that which all objects can only represent. Why? Because objects are individuated conceptually. They are described or named by signi¢ers. And the Thing, as we shall see, is the very origin of the signi¢er, the moment at which something happens in the real which lays it open to the incursion of the signi¢er: `Right at the beginning of the organisation of the world in the psyche, both logically and chronologically, das Ding is something that presents and isolates itself as the strange feature around which the whole movement of the Vorstellung turns' (SVII: 57, my italics). The Thing is the real insofar as it makes possible the signi¢er. It is not nature as the entirely non-historical, but the precondition of history.

Lacan and Heidegger on the Thing

47

This is why Lacan calls the Thing `prehistoric' (SVII: 56, my italics).15 It is the moment at which the real becomes historical, when nature makes the transition into history. Thus, the thing, by marking the chronological origin of the signi¢er, straddles the real and the symbolic: `the Thing is that which in the real, the primordial real, I shall say, su¡ers from the signi¢er [. . .] both the real of the subject and the real he has to deal with as exterior to him' (SVII: 118). It is not the real `in itself ' that preceded the symbolic altogether, but the real insofar as the signi¢er has already wounded it, created a hole in it, made it `su¡er'. The thing is the real insofar as a hole has been made into which the signi¢er can enter and then colonize the real, opening up breaches between beings and their names. We are to take quite literally this notion of the signi¢er's creating a hole in the real. This is precisely what man as homo faber (producer) does when he begins to apply his techne to the real. It is here that Lacan will overlap with Heidegger, as he explicitly invokes the latter's notion of the thing as the vase. The thing, therefore, is that which in the real has been made susceptible to the word: das Ding insofar as it is the very correlative of the law of speech in its most primitive point of origin, and in the sense that this Ding was there from the beginning, that it was the ¢rst thing that separated itself from everything the subject began to name and articulate. (SVII: 83) This is the law which marks the nature of the symbolic order, and it is one of distance or the di¡erentiality of the signi¢er, which severs human being from its original proximity to nature, a proximity that is felt rather than conceptually understood: Das Ding is that which I will call the beyond-of-the-signi¢ed [le hors-signi¢e¨ ].16 It is as a function of this beyond-of-the-signi¢ed and of an emotional relationship [un rapport pathe¨tique] to it that the subject keeps its distance and is constituted in a kind of relationship characterised by primary a¡ect [a¡ect primaire], prior to any repression. (SVII: 54) This is why the Law is often symbolized as the law which prohibits incest or the law forbidding an immediate relation with god. Thus, by introducing distance into an original intimacy, the law decrees that there should be di¡erence: in a word, signi¢ers. The thing is the moment at which nature became cultured. `Freud contributes [. . .] the a¤rmation of the discovery, that the fundamental or primordial law, the one where culture begins in opposition to nature, is the law of the prohibition of incest' (SVII: 66^7). Thus Lacan identi¢es the mother as one of the things which we put in the place of the thing, which we project as a moment of full proximity to nature. Thus he speaks `of the maternal thing, of the mother, insofar as she occupies the place of that thing, of das Ding' (SVII: 67).

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The Thing then acts as the origin of Law itself, the law governing culture as opposed to nature, the moment of `commandment' and `regulation': it is in the same place that something which is the opposite, the reverse and the same combined, is also organised, and which in the end substitutes itself for that dumb reality which is das Ding ^ that is to say, the reality that commands and regulates. (SVII: 55) But from our perspective, the signi¢er appears always to have been here. We cannot envisage a moment when it was not. Any attempt we make to understand the pre-symbolic immediately con¢nes it to the limits of our understanding and thus reappropriates it to the signi¢er: nature in itself is con¢ned to the opposition of `nature and culture'. Thus, from our perspective, we have to presuppose that the signi¢er was created from nothing, ex nihilo, because nothing (that we can envisage) could have preceded it (cf. SVII: 21). It had to be created at some point, because human beings have not always existed. This is why there must be `an absolute beginning, which marks the origin of the signifying chain' (SVII: 214). Since the thing cannot adequately be represented by any signi¢er, it must be understood as that onto which the signi¢er projects images which depict the very origin of the signi¢er, the moment and site of its creation: `the ¢eld of the Thing, this ¢eld onto which is projected something beyond, something at the point of origin of the signifying chain' (SVII: 214). This what de¢nes the thing. It is merely an empty place onto which the signi¢er projects images of the mythical moment of its own creation, a moment at which the signi¢er is intimate with nature, when in truth the signi¢er irrevocably distances man from such intimacy. If the Thing marks the moment of the signi¢er's origin, it is neither real nor symbolic, or it is both. It is Lacan's attempt to think the chronological moment of the signi¢er's origin, or rather, it is his attempt to understand why the signifier is compelled to believe in this mythic moment of its absolute creation from a unique origin. If the Thing is the origin of the signi¢er, it indicates that there is something which preceded the signi¢er altogether, the `real in itself '. As the origin of the signi¢er, the Thing naturally precedes opposition, which is a relation that characterizes the di¡erentiality of the signi¢er: `the signi¢er as such is constituted of oppositional structures whose emergence profoundly modi¢es the human world' (SVII: 119). `There is not a good and a bad object; there is good and bad [an opposition], and then there is the Thing. The good and the bad already belong to the order of the Vorstellung' (SVII: 63). Lacan is quite clear that the world of represented objects is organized by signi¢ers: `the world of the Vorstellung is already organised according to the possibilities of the signi¢er as such' (SVII: 61). In other words, oppositionality as such arises only once the signi¢er is in place. The real knows nothing like it. But the thing, as a real entity which has already become vulnerable to the signi¢er, makes this oppositionality possible: `Emptiness and fullness are introduced into a world that by itself knows not

Lacan and Heidegger on the Thing

49

of them. It is on the basis of this fabricated signi¢er, this vase [a thing], that emptiness and fullness as such enter the world' (SVII: 120). We shall later examine the way in which this opposition is created. If the Thing is the origin of the opposition this explains why, with regard to the signi¢er, `das Ding is at the centre only in the sense that it is excluded [. . .] das Ding has to be posited as exterior' (SVII: 71). It is the centre of Vorstellung, the point at which the signifying order is anchored in the real: `das Ding is something that presents and isolates itself as the strange feature around which the whole movement of the Vorstellung turns' (SVII: 57). Because the thing precedes the signi¢er it can be described as `dumb' (SVII: 55) or `unnameable' (SVII: 188). We shall come to suggest that this dumbness may be construed as being `struck dumb', silenced forever and rendered inaccessible by the advent of the signi¢er, which explains the Thing's dumb `su¡ering' (SVII: 261, my italics), its `pain' (SVII: 60), which Lacan understands as petrifaction, the state from which there is no escape: `we should perhaps conceive of pain as a ¢eld which, in the realm of existence, opens precisely onto that limit where a living being has no possibility of escape' (SVII: 60). `Isn't it true that the living being who has no possibility of escape suggests in its very form the presence of what one might call petri¢ed pain?' (SVII: 60). To be suspended in a state of su¡ering reveals that there is no `return to the void': `Su¡ering is conceived of as a stasis which a¤rms that that which is cannot return to the void from which it emerged?' (SVII: 261). This means that once the real has been rendered inaccessible by the signi¢er ^ which also means inaccessible to itself ^ it can never return to itself, or return to a time when there was no signi¢er. Lacan at one point speaks of the subject as that which su¡ers from the signi¢er: `For it is a matter here of the subject insofar as he su¡ers from the signi¢er' (SVII: 143).17 This would explain the apparent anthropomorphization of the real apparent in the word `su¡ering', although I believe that we can take this word in an ontological sense, as Heidegger does with the word `pain' (Schmerz).18 If the reason one su¡ers is because one is trapped within the signifying order, the symbolic, and if one su¡ers because the Thing exists as a reminder that there is another place than the symbolic, the Thing is `beyond the pleasure principle': `On the horizon, beyond the pleasure principle, there rises up [. . .] das Ding' (SVII: 73), `Freud at the end of his thinking discovers once again the ¢eld of das Ding, and points out to us the space beyond the pleasure principle' (SVII: 104). The pleasure principle (Lustprinzip) is nothing but the presence of the signi¢er which always maintains a certain barrier between ourselves and the real, so that the degree of excitation which penetrates us remains minimal, in order to prevent man's delicate nervous system from being £ooded or `traumatized'. Lacan also describes the Thing as the `Es' (`Id' or `it'), the unconscious thing which cannot be given the pronoun of the enunciated or grammatical subject (sujet de l'e¨nonce¨ ), `I' (SVII: 137). The pleasure principle for Lacan is the law of signi¢ers, or objects, which we pursue or avoid as good or bad, which we take to be the objects that will ful¢l

50

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our needs. But these objects act to keep us away from the Thing which we truly desire: `what is found is sought, but sought in the paths of the signi¢er. Now this search is in a way an antipsychic search that by its place and function is beyond the pleasure principle' (SVII: 118^19). Signi¢ers keep man at a distance from the Thing: `the symbol ¢rst manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subject's desire' (Lacan 2006 [1966]: 262). Indeed, the pleasure principle is precisely the distance that the signi¢er cannot but maintain from the real. The Thing is, however, what regulates the functioning of the pleasure principle and gives it its law, which is precisely to avoid a direct encounter with the Thing: a signi¢er is `something that is always a certain distance from the Thing, even if it is regulated by the Thing, which is there in a beyond' (SVII: 63). The Thing by its very nature enjoins signi¢ers and man's pursuit of signi¢ers, `objects', in order to keep man away from the Thing: `The pleasure principle governs the search for the object and imposes the detours which maintain the distance in relation to its end' (SVII: 58). The function of the pleasure principle is, in e¡ect, to lead the subject from signi¢er to signi¢er, by generating as many signi¢ers as are required to maintain at as low a level as possible the tension that regulates the whole functioning of the psychic apparatus. (SVII: 119) It would not make sense to think of the Thing as the real tout court, since the real would not be interested in protecting an organism from a direct encounter with the real. The Thing is very precisely the real insofar as the signi¢er has already impinged upon it. And once this has happened there is no going back, and so the Thing must be understood as that which `commands and regulates' the pleasure principle, the organization of signi¢ers, which compels us to pursue various objects that are not the Thing. This is why the Thing is described as what is lacking at the centre of our desire: `The question of das Ding is still attached to whatever is open, lacking, or gaping at the centre of our desire' (SVII: 84), it is the very `place of desire' (SVII: 110). The Thing is what each signi¢er desires and at the same time maintains at a distance, since no di¡erential signi¢er can ever be adequate to the self-proximity of the real. Thus the Thing maintains desire by leaving it constantly unsatis¢ed. When the Thing enters the signi¢er, it ceases to be das Ding, and becomes die Sache. This is the thing insofar as it is spoken in words, insofar as it is represented by an individual signi¢er, an object of desire. It thus becomes di¡used from a single Thing into a plurality of objects: `It is precisely as we shift into discourse that das Ding, the Thing, is resolved into a series of e¡ects ^ in the sense that one can say meine Sache' (SVII: 63). Thus the one real Thing which stirs our desire is refracted into a series of objects which our desire pursues. Insofar as these signi¢ers each represent the Thing, which they do negatively insofar as they are designed to keep us away from it, as constant distractions which we temporarily believe to be the `real Thing', they are called, not merely Vorstellungen, representations, but VorstellungsreprÌsentanzen: those

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51

representatives which represent representation. They represent the very fact of representation, the very origin of representation or the signi¢er, which explains why it exists at all. The VorstellungsreprÌsentanz `is in its signifying essence a signi¢er of nothing other than of signifying as such' (SVII: 120). The lost object Man is always already in£icted with the signi¢er, he ¢nds himself `thrown' into it as an inescapable given. Because of this, the Thing will always already have been lost. It is a `lost object': `the object as such is lost. It will never be found again' (SVII: 52). This is why the thing is not an object, because we have never had the Thing in our possession. Thus the Thing will always have been lost. Indeed, the fact that it was never our belonging means that, in fact, it can never have been lost: `since it is a matter of ¢nding it again, we might just as well characterize this object as a lost object. But although it is essentially a question of ¢nding it again, the object indeed has never been lost' (SVII: 58). Therefore, the Thing itself is nothing but a mirage, created retrospectively by those objects which we desire, each of which we pursue as if it were the Thing, but each of which, precisely by virtue of its individuation, its status as a signi¢er or object, fails to live up to that Thing which is not an object. This is why Lacan will say that the Thing is lost only because it is continually refound: something that Freud presents, on the other hand, as necessarily corresponding to the ¢nd itself, as necessarily being the wiedergefundene or refound object. Such is for Freud the fundamental de¢nition of the object in its guiding function, the paradox of which I have already demonstrated, for it is not a¤rmed that this object was really lost. The object is by nature a refound object. That it was lost is a consequence of that ^ but after the fact [apre©s coup]. It is thus refound without our knowing, except through the re¢nding, that it was ever lost. (SVII: 118, my italics, cf. SVII: 58) Lacan immediately goes on to say that, `the Thing in question is, by virtue of its structure, open to being represented by what I called earlier [. . .] the Other thing [Autre-Chose]' (SVII: 118). Up to this point is will have seemed as if Lacan is saying that this half-real, half-symbolic Thing is what actually makes the signi¢er possible. But now, he undercuts this impression. He demonstrates by way of a genetic explanation involving man as homo faber that this apparent condition of possibility is a mirage created retrospectively by a certain factual turn of events. Something happens in the course of evolution, man becomes a producer, and this has a certain e¡ect on the real which creates the e¡ect (in both senses) that there was a condition of possibility of the arrival of the signi¢er, an absolute moment of origin, a Thing. The signi¢er will then appear to have been created ex nihilo. But in fact this nihil is precisely what is created. And it is created by man in his fabricating activity. Man scoops out a void in the real by means of the use of tools.

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This will be, metaphorically and literally, a cave in which to shelter, a way to block the natural course of the elements, which nevertheless rage around it. Thus, with his notion of the Thing, Lacan is unmasking the illusion of the transcendental by asking after its genetic conditions in the real. It is not as if the signi¢er has a unique moment of origin. Rather, it develops gradually, but the signi¢er must create the myth that it was created from nothing. We shall see the evidence for this in Lacan's example of the vase, which is what presentday archaeologists understand to be the origin of the signi¢er. In other words, this thing seems to us to be such an origin, but this origin is in truth a myth. Lacan, when speaking of the signi¢ers which the Thing organizes, by means of its di¡usion into a series of objects, says that the Thing can only be represented by an `Other-thing'.19 We shall see that in fact there are only `Otherthings' and no one `Thing', and that this mirage of a Thing may in truth be resolved into the movement of `Othering', of continually altering the object of one's desire such that one never rests on one thing.20 If this ever happened, if desire were ever sated, this would be akin to a complete extirpation of the signi¢er and a return to the void which pain or su¡ering reveals to be impossible. Once the real `su¡ers' from the signi¢er, the su¡ering never ends. The Other Thing(s) In reading Seminar VII, it is absolutely crucial to distinguish between the Thing, that one monolithic mythical Thing which desire believes that it strives for, and those `other things' which are objects created by man in order to represent the Thing. We are thus required to understand that the sequence of representations (`other things') in fact precedes what they represent (`the Thing'). This would explain why Lacan speaks of man's position as follows: `the Thing is situated in the relationship that places man in the mediating function between the real and the signi¢er' (SVII: 129, my italics). Which is to say that man, and not the Thing, raises the signi¢er from the real. Thus, from this moment, Lacan begins his fascinating disquisition on man's creative activity in his (and Heidegger's) example of the vase, a `thing' which, since it is a signi¢er, should not be confused with the Thing: `it is a thing that is not, of course, the Thing' (SVII: 118). It is a question of the creative activity of man as producer retrospectively creating the illusion of a creator god moulding man and the signi¢er in a moment of divine creation. This is the myth that there is one Thing that would mark the one unique moment of origin of the signi¢er as a whole. This may be understood from Lacan's describing the Thing as `fundamentally veiled': If the Thing were not fundamentally veiled, we wouldn't be in the kind of relationship to it that obliges us, as the whole of psychic life is obliged, to encircle it or bypass it in order to conceive it [. . .]; it always presents itself as a veiled entity. (SVII: 118, my italics) It is onto this veil that man projects the series of Other-things which his desire will then pursue in the belief that they amount to what lies behind the curtain:

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53

`the Thing in question is, by virtue of its structure, open to being represented by [. . .] the Other-thing [Autre-Chose]' (SVII: 118). Lacan believes that these other-things cannot be just any old object: they must be objects of art, produced by man. In particular he thinks of these things as objects of artistic creation or sublimation, which for Freud was the essence of such creative activity. Sublimation `raises an object [. . .] to the dignity of the Thing' (SVII: 112). It creates an object in such a way that it pretends to represent the Thing, the ultimate object of desire. Lacan speaks of what is chronologically `the ¢rst of such signi¢ers fashioned by the human hand' (SVII: 120), the vase created by the potter, the earliest example of man as homo faber, at least `[a]ccording to a fable' (SVII: 119). The vase is, apparently, a purely functional object. To the archaeologists who dig it up, the vase actually represents, when viewed from the perspective of the present, the moment at which the signi¢er was ¢rst summoned up from the real. `It is perhaps the most primordial feature of human industry. It is certainly a tool, a utensil that allows us to a¤rm unambiguously a human presence wherever we ¢nd it. This vase which has always been there . . .' (SVII: 119^20). Lacan, like Freud, understands art as an act of creation, a sublimation: `here we encounter linguistic usage that, at least in connection with sublimation in the sphere of art, never hesitates to speak of creation' (SVII: 119). From an ordinary object it fashions the Thing beyond representation: `an object, insofar as it is a created object, may ¢ll the function that enables it not to avoid the Thing as signi¢er, but to represent it' (SVII: 119). Lacan seems to identify this artistic creation with other more mundane forms of production, anything carried out by `homo faber, production and the producer' (SVII: 214). Thus, every act of artistic creation would attempt to capture that (mythical) moment at which the very ¢rst signi¢er was created by homo faber: `Production is an original domain, a domain of creation ex nihilo, insofar as it introduces into the natural world the organisation of the signi¢er' (SVII: 214). What this production produces is a void: `the potter [. . .] creates the vase with his hand around this emptiness, creates it, just like the mythical creator, ex nihilo, starting with a hole' (SVII: 121), `the fashioning of the signi¢er and the introduction of a gap or a hole in the real are identical' (SVII: 121). The created void is something which may thereafter be ¢lled. Thus the production of the vase creates the very ¢rst opposition, between emptiness and fullness (SVII: 120). Lacan also refers to Yin and Yang to exemplify such an original opposition, which he de¢nes as follows: `one [half ] is assumed to be eclipsed by the rise and return of the other' (SVII: 223). This clearly di¡erentiates these sublimated objects, become `things', from the Thing, since the latter was clearly said to precede opposition (SVII: 120), while the Other-thing which is taken to represent the Thing within the signi¢er is said to create the very notion of opposition. The contrast is too striking not to be deliberate. This vase opened up an emptiness in the real. Thus it is not as if the production of the ¢rst signi¢er began from nothing (nihil ). Rather, Lacan says that this

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created emptiness is presented as a nihil: `the vase [. . .] as an object made to represent the existence of the emptiness at the centre of the real that is called the Thing, this emptiness as represented in the representation presents itself as a nihil, as nothing' (SVII: 121, my italics). This is to say that when we view this act of production retrospectively it seems to us that it is an act of creation from nothing, that marks a clear-cut beginning of the signi¢er. This means that the very act of creation creates the illusion that it is a creation from nothing. This is the creation of the mirage of the Thing as the one unique origin of the signi¢er, such that the creation of the vase seems to be the creation of the signi¢er tout court. Thus, when a work of art today mimics the act of the original human producer it attempts to mimic what it sees as the genuine moment of creation, the production of something radically new. It evokes a mythical moment: art depicts myth. Lacan will come to identify art, on the model of the potter's vase, and particularly architecture, as involving a certain hollow. Indeed, he goes so far as to say that the work of art always encloses an emptiness. This is because `a work of art always involves encircling the Thing' (SVII: 141). `The object is established in a certain relationship to the Thing and is intended to encircle and to render both present and absent' (SVII: 141). `[T]his Thing will always be represented by emptiness [un vide], precisely because it cannot be represented by anything else ^ or, more exactly, because it can only be represented by something else [autre chose]' (SVII: 129^30). To sublimate thus means to render an ordinary object extraordinary, sublime, representing something of another order, ethereal to the point of non-existence ^ as `sublimation' in chemistry refers to the transubstantiation of a solid into a gas. Sublimation measures out the distance between the representational Other-thing or some-thing Else, and the Thing itself. The Thing itself is inaccessible to representation since it is precisely that which exceeds the very order of representation as its supposed condition of possibility. Any act of sublimation, which means any artistic creation, always `projects [images] beyond the barrier', the barrier of objects which form our world, entities insofar as we appropriate them unto ourselves, render them intelligible or represent them: `In order to compensate for that inaccessibility, all individual sublimation is projected beyond that barrier' (SVII: 203).21 Sublimation presents an image of the Thing. It takes an ordinary object (Lacan's example is the mundane object of the still life) and renders it in an extraordinary way, such that it becomes an image of the Thing. This is why Lacan says that the signi¢er is fashioned `in the image of the Thing': `man fashions this signi¢er and introduces it into the world ^ in other words, we need to know what he does when he fashions it in the image of the Thing' (SVII: 125). This explains why the signi¢er always encloses an emptiness, because `the Thing is characterised by the fact that it is impossible for us to imagine it' (SVII: 125, my italics). No signi¢er can be supplied for that which is beyond the signi¢er, so Lacan invokes a third realm, distinct from both the real and

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the symbolic, which acts as a bu¡er between them, and a joint: the imaginary or the image-like (l'imaginaire). Art and sublimation are the creation of an artistic image. They imagine what the origin of the signi¢er was like and attempt to depict the very moment at which sense emerges from nonsense. The other-thing which sublimation produces is an image of that which cannot be imagined. It is a signi¢er which attempts to represent the birth of the signi¢er. The thing can be represented only as an emptiness or lack in the signi¢er, something which the signi¢er cannot properly represent, since it ties the signi¢er back to the pre-signi¢er, the nonsigni¢er, nature, from which the signi¢er emerged. This is why `[t]he object is established in a certain relationship to the Thing and is intended to encircle and to render both present and absent' (SVII: 141, my italics). Use and Jouissance: Need and Drive What are these things, produced by artists through sublimation? Lacan gives a wonderful example of an ordinarily useful object, a matchbox. The matchbox is transformed into a work of art precisely by being emptied of matches and thus rendered useless. Everything that is `useful' about the matchbox is discarded, and a beautiful structure is formed, by half-opening the drawer of the matchbox and creating a winding chain of interlocking matchboxes (SVII: 114).22 What Lacan is attempting to convey with this example is a contrast between a thing's use-value and the way in which a thing of use can also be enjoyed. This is its `jouissance-use': `in this thing, whether it be rare or not, but in any case a made thing, in all this wealth ¢nally [. . .] there is from the beginning something other than use value. There is its jouissance use' (SVII: 229). A functional thing has two aspects: it satis¢es a need when we use it as a means to an end, and it is an object that we can enjoy. This is a Koje©vian opposition between the world of work and the world of enjoyment. One works on the world in order to transform it into an object that can be enjoyed when work is over. We are speaking of an object's dual function as object of need and object of desire. Desire is that which remains unsatis¢ed in need, in spite of the provision of the object needed. It is the excess of need. We get what we need and yet remain unsatis¢ed: this is desire. Lacan goes on to explain desire as resulting from the memory of our relation to the real before the symbolic, which memory is embodied in what is named `drive'. Drive's object is enjoyment as that moment of proximity (to oneself and to the other) prior to the distantiation carried out by the signi¢er. Thus the drive circles around the Thing, as that moment at which the signi¢er is supposed to remain connected to the real. The thing is an object not of need but of enjoyment, that which exceeds the stern world of necessity and simply plays: thus Lacan speaks of `that barrier beyond which the analytical Thing is to be found [. . .] where the inaccessibility

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of the object as object of jouissance is organised' (SVII: 203, cf. 202). Thus if one is to raise an object to the dignity of the Thing, one must relieve it of its usevalue. It is insofar as the uselessness of an object is brought to the fore that the object appears as an image of the Thing. In the proximity of enjoyment, where one's needs are satis¢ed and one's longing sated, one is reminded of the mythical real in which proximity is all-pervasive and the permanently unsatisfying distance introduced by the signi¢er has not yet arrived. If the Thing is the mediator between the real and the symbolic, it is no longer a part of the universe of useful objects which serve needs. It is rather something which, while intimating this universe, also refers back to the pre-signi¢cant world of enjoyment. When Lacan speaks of the `dignity of the thing', dignity should be taken in the Kantian sense, as the speci¢c character of the human being when he is related to not simply as a means but also as an end in himself, to be respected in an ethical stance.23 The reference is not at all implausible given that this is the seminar in which Lacan speaks of all three of Kant's Critiques and the topic of `Kant with Sade'. This is the status which the object must enjoy in order to be raised above its utility and onto the level of the Thing. Enjoyment would be a relation of immediacy uninfected by the di¡erentiality, distance and mediation introduced into human life by the signi¢er. A thing is an object of jouissance, and jouissance is `the satisfaction of a drive' (SVII: 209). In other words, jouissance occurs when a drive is satis¢ed; or rather, jouissance is what satis¢es a drive. And this is a satisfaction other than the satisfaction of a need. Lacan tells us that when a need is satis¢ed, the drive always demands something else: an other thing. It is drive that goes unsatis¢ed when need is satis¢ed: `the Trieb [. . .] is not simply instinct, but has a relationship to das Ding as such, to the Thing insofar as it is distinct from the object' (SVII: 111), `the level of das Ding [. . .] is the place of the Triebe, the drives' (SVII: 110). And a drive is satis¢ed by something other than the natural aim of the instinct, which always serves a survival need. The sublimation that provides the Trieb with a satisfaction di¡erent from its aim ^ an aim that is still de¢ned as its natural aim ^ is precisely that which reveals the true nature of the Trieb insofar as it is not simply instinct. (SVII: 110) The drive aims at the non-useful part of the object of need, that which remains to be consumed even after the object has satis¢ed our need. It is the desire to carry on eating the comestible even after one's hunger has been sated, for the sake of pure enjoyment. Thus the drive is a result of the perversion of the natural aim of the instinct. This amounts to the bifurcation of need into need and demand. This bifurcation is a result of the signi¢er, which forces a simple object of need to become a symbol of something more. To prove this, Lacan speaks here of what he addressed in his earlier seminars with regard to the Oedipus complex,24 the acculturation of the individual human infant: the demand for (a symbol of ) love inherent in the child's demands for the object of need. Once the signi¢er is involved, objects of need can and will be something more than that, even if one

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is not sure what that is. Retrospectively, from the point of view of the adult, the surplus beyond the satis¢ed need can be interpreted as a demand for love. Once the object of need has failed to materialize, a doubt arises in the child's mind as to the omnipotence, omnipresence and benevolence of the provider of his needs, the mother. At the same time another layer is added to the object: the child must receive it not only to satisfy a need but also to prove to the child that its cries will be answered. Thus the object of need becomes a symbol. The gap between the mother and the child is opened by her ¢rst failure to be there to answer his needs, and we know that this distance is just what is needed to make possible the di¡erentiality of the signi¢er. Once this terrible moment of dissatisfaction has arrived, the worry never goes away that the provider of one's needs will abandon us or withhold their gift. Thus any object of need will always be split into an object of need and an object of demand, a real entity and a symbol of love. Absence, the absence of the object and the provider of the object, is ontogenetically consubstantial with the introduction of a void into the (mythical) plenum of the real. This plenum is the state of full and immediate satisfaction, the intrauterine or quasi-intrauterine state, which is the mythical time of a perfect harmony between the child's needs and the mother's provision. And since the void is the beginning of the signi¢er, it is precisely the signi¢er that arises with the addition of the symbolic status of the objects of need. The signi¢er is understood here solely as the quality of di¡erentiality. Only when the real is left behind can something `stand for' something else, take its place in a structure of referral, whose elements are independent of it. Drive is therefore the attempt to symbolize the real that came before the symbolic. The symbol sought is the symbol of the real, of that moment of proximity which we feel ourselves to have lost with the emergence of the signi¢er's ambiguity. The object of the drive is the Thing. The drive desires a signi¢cant object that would amount to a return to the real before signi¢ers: it wants con¢rmation that it is still in immediate relation with itself and with another. But this is precisely the myth that the signi¢er projects. Once desire begins, it projects a state before desire, a myth of a time before its own beginning, whose loss would ¢rst constitute it as desire. That is why demand is never satis¢ed, and why need always retains its surplus of desire. We have seen how an ordinary object is made to represent this mythical Thing. It is by sublimation. Thus the drive is satis¢ed by sublimation, where a use-object is made to represent the mythical Thing, the object of enjoyment, which enjoyment is the drive's satisfaction. `Sublimation [. . .] involves a certain form of satisfaction of the Triebe' (SVII: 110). The Thing would be the object of need which sated desire, a signi¢er fully adequate to the real. We are constantly presented with such `Things' in consumer society, as Z­iz­ek in particular has long pointed out. They are one and all a myth, as is clearly seen by their very plurality: each one is just an `other-thing' to consume, and Lacan describes drive precisely as the `[w]ill for an Other-thing, given that everything can be challenged from the perspective of the function of the signi¢er' (SVII: 212).

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Why is drive not satis¢ed by a single object if that object is enjoyable? Because its satisfaction derives from constant movement. What it wants is the constant passage between objects (`other things') that circle around and delineate the Thing which sublime objects have artfully been made to represent, projected as they are onto its veil, raised to the dignity of its place. Thus the drive circles around the circuit of `goods', which amount to objects insofar as they satisfy needs, each of which has become an image of the Thing; the drive's circular trajectory traces a line through the series of goods and this line delineates the image of the Thing. This is why the drive is the will for `something else'. And this is why the representations of the Thing precede and create the illusion of that which they represent: the Thing itself. Why then is the Thing around which the drive pulses an object of enjoyment? Is it because the enjoyable aspect of the object of need, its gratuitousness, refers back to the Thing as the indicator of that which came before the signi¢er, before the utility and distance which it commanded? Enjoyment itself, in the moment of `leisure', freed from the tyranny of toil, would then remind us of a time before tools. If the Thing is the place of desire, then this would make drive the very pulsation of desire, its motivation and its sporadic character, its sudden and extreme projection towards one object, followed by exhaustion and subsequent redirection towards another object, an Other-thing. The myth of the Thing, perfection, the Woman, stirs the artistic production of Other-things, just as the notion of a god stirred the creation of the empty spaces around which temples gather. This ultimate object of desire ^ the Thing ^ does not exist. What drives desire is ultimately the constant shifting of aims, caused by the drive which strives after ever new enjoyments and hence after objects which are ever changing, since enjoyment consumes its objects. It is the fact that the veil conceals that drives drive on to ¢nd a new angle from which to pierce it. The delineation of the Thing by the circular trajectory of the drive as it consumes objects of need is precisely the gesture which the potter's hands make when he creates an object that surrounds a void at its centre. This shaping of a useful object of art thus presents the `nothing' of the thing: `an object made to represent the existence of the emptiness at the centre of the real that is called the Thing, this emptiness as represented in the representation presents itself as a nihil, as nothing' (SVII: 121) It is crucial to see that emptiness, which the potter creates by carving out a hollow, is presented in the signi¢er as nothing, which is to say as the nothing from which the signi¢er is supposedly created. So this is not to say that nothing was something that existed positively before the signi¢er was introduced, but that this is how the Thing is presented, how things appear from the point of view of the signi¢er. In other words, the Thing is a mirage that the creation of the signi¢er creates: it is only by shaping the vase's sides that a hollow space, a nothing, is carved out in the real of clay. What is crucial is that the emptiness is something created by man, and it gives rise to the illusion of the mythical theological nothing (nihil) from which God is

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said to have drawn the whole of Creation. This is why Lacan refers here to the theological analogy of god as a potter (SVII: 121). This very notion of creatio ex nihilo is a myth, and one with a perfectly `rational' explanation. One ¢nds it in the ¢rst products of homo faber, who carved out the ¢rst hollow, which was then presented in the signi¢er, perhaps only for the archaeologist of the present, as the `nihil ' or pre-symbolic void from which all Creation was said to stem. There was no sudden absolute beginning of the symbolic order, that is just a myth. The work of art is indeed created around nothing. The Thing does not exist, it never did. It is `no-thing'. This is why Lacan's examples of Things tend to be mythical, as for example Moses' burning bush.25 The network of Vorstellungen, objects of desire in the psychic economy, signi¢ers, `Ziele' (aims), encircle nothing. These Other-things, in their organization, circle around and delineate the place of the Thing. But the centre of the circle is empty: there is noThing there, there is only the encircling. And the rushing of the whirlwind makes the veil rustle to suggest something behind it where in truth there is only a void. This is why the circle is a `magic circle' (SVII: 134). Magic creates something that is an illusion, and `Magic Circles' always protect a secret. The secret here is that the circle of aims is sustained by nothing: the nothing of desire is the void which man ¢rst carved in the real to make room for the signi¢er. Desire retrospectively creates the mirage of a Thing that preceded it, as the pathological core of the trauma around which the patient's words and behaviour circle while avoiding, in the free associations of psycho-analytic sessions and neurotic symptoms. Death Drive and the Second Death The death drive is the will for the Other-thing, a constant destruction of every object of desire, driven by the need to produce another object for desire to aim at. It is thus both the drive to destroy a signi¢er and the desire to create another: `a destruction drive, given that it challenges everything that exists. But it is also a will to create from zero, a will to begin again' (SVII: 212). One begins again, naturally, by way of the sublimation that takes another object and raises it to the level of the Thing. It is this lust for destruction beyond and irrespective of the level of needs that allows drive, itself a result of the emergence of the signi¢er, to make possible the destruction of both the signi¢er and nature which provides for our needs. Thus the drive made possible by the signi¢er's splitting of need opens up the possibility of destroying nature and man himself. The destruction of nature, with its cycle of generation and degeneration, birth and death, is named by Lacan, after Sade, `the second death'. The ¢rst death is the natural death of an individual entity, the second is the death of the very cycle of birth and death itself: `death insofar as it is regarded as the point at which the very cycles of the transformations of nature are annihilated' (SVII: 248), which `suspends everything that has to do with transformation, with the cycle of generation and decay or with history itself ' (SVII: 285). This is why Lacan says that we catch a glimpse of the Thing when we imagine the extinction of the whole human race (SVII: 104^5). One glimpses the Thing

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and not the primordial real, the real in itself, because one envisages this from the point of view of the human being, and one will always interpret both the after and the before of the human symbolic negatively in comparison with the symbolic. The signi¢er can think only in terms of oppositions: the natural is the non-cultural. What one is imagining in the nuclear fulguration is the limit, the moment of extinction, which, as the end of the symbolic, mirrors the beginning, the origin of the signi¢er, was represented as the Thing, rather than the real or nature in itself, independent of all signi¢ers. The drive `points to the site that I designate alternatively as impassable or as the site of the Thing' (SVII: 213). Drive is thus a death-drive in that it opens up the possibility of the second death, by tracing out a space of annihilation in its circling. It revolves around the brink of a void into which nature itself might plunge, or rather be hurled. The death drive therefore indicates that there is a beyond of the symbolic, and that is the ex nihilo, the Thing as the void within the symbolic, which is man's mythic appropriation of the real from which the signi¢er ¢rst emerged. The death drive indicates that `there is somewhere ^ though certainly outside of the natural world ^ which is the beyond of that chain [of signi¢ers], the ex nihilo on which it is founded' (SVII: 212). Even if the real in itself cannot be represented by the signi¢er without being appropriated, it is nevertheless present as what cannot be represented. Absence enters into an opposition with presence, and oppositions are possible only after the signi¢er's di¡erentiality has arisen; Lacan is quite explicit that the real precedes opposition. Therefore, this absence may be understood as the inaccessibility of the real as non-oppositional from the point of view of the oppositional symbolic. Oppositionality as such closes out the real altogether. In other words, the other-Things, which attempt to represent the Thing, present the Thing as nothing. There is no Thing: `at the level of the Vorstellungen, the Thing is not nothing, but literally is not. It is characterised by its absence, its strangeness' (SVII: 63). And yet. This Thing, as nothing, as non-existent, precisely indicates that there is something which is nothing for the symbolic, and that is the real in itself. That which precedes the symbolic. And if there was something before the symbolic, there can be something after it. Its ¢nitude and entire eradication is intimated here. The signi¢er can say nothing about this real in itself, which we have called `nature'. But in the guise of the Thing, approached in sublime art, it can admit and show that the signi¢er elides something. And this will be the real in itself as it was before the signi¢er emerged.

Things of Art and Nature Thus we have returned to the notion of the death of nature. For Lacan, it is the irruption of the signi¢er, which holes the real and renders its pre-perforated state inaccessible, that allows there to be a drive which is excessive, over and

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above need, and which ultimately leads to the excesses of mass production and mass consumption which are slowly devastating nature. Thus, for Lacan, the signi¢er's perversion of need into drive upsets the balance of techne and physis and the possibility of a destructive technology opens up. I think it could be said that Lacan is compelled to think techne as inherently excessive, as destined to become `technology', in the sense of the dangerous postindustrial imbalance we have been indicating. It remains to be seen whether Heidegger believes that it is possible for human beings to exist in a balance with nature, or whether for him, techne was also always bound for technology and the rape of nature to the point of absolute exhaustion and indeed a `second' death. And here do we not ¢nd a signi¢cant di¡erence between Lacan's Thing and Heidegger's thing? Does it not seem that Lacan's Other-thing, which represents the Thing, is of necessity a made-thing? If sublimation through the act of human creation is required to raise an object of need to the level of the Thing, is it not the case that only artefacts can be `things'? `[A]n object, insofar as it is a created object, may ¢ll the function that enables it not to avoid the Thing as signi¢er, but to represent it' (SVII: 119, my italics). It would however seem just as logical for Lacan to have allowed objects of nature to represent the Thing simply because things are objects of use insofar as they are not useful, insofar as they are not taken as objects of need. And did Kant not stress above all the sublimity of nature? For Heidegger, on the other hand, things are precisely natural entities. It is true that Heidegger admits that the jug, his example of a thing, is independent of the human subject and therefore not an object only because it is the object of a production (Herstellen) (Th: 167/169). But he says this only to address an imaginary objection and goes on immediately to say that to take the thing in this way is still to take it as an object standing in relation to the human being (Th: 167/169):26 `but that which in the jug's nature is its own [Eigene des Krugwesens] is never brought about by its making [Herstellung]' (Th: 168/170). The jug had to be what it is before being made, otherwise what would guide its making? I wonder if here we might pose a question to Lacan. It is one with which Heidegger also struggles. Is it really the case that the potter creates the void at the centre of the thing? Must the void not already exist before he thinks to shape the clay around it? Does Lacan's refusal of this possibility indicate that his perspective remains in the precinct of the early Heideggerian approach to the meaning of being, which takes man to be the ground of being? His techne would be that which makes being possible. It seems to me that in the way Lacan expresses the origination of the signi¢er in Seminar VII he is compelled to endorse this, and this explains why he can think the Thing only as an object of art and not as an entity of nature. This is precisely the possibility which the later Heidegger opens up. We have seen the gradual dawning of nature in Heidegger's thought already in Chapter 1.

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Heidegger's Thing Heidegger's example of a thing is a jug (ein Krug). This thing is di¡erentiated from an object in precisely the way Lacan's is. The thing is not an object because it does not depend on the human subject for its support: in other words, it does not require an observing consciousness, theoretical or practical, to represent it. `As a vessel the jug is something self-sustained, something that stands on its own. This standing on its own characterises the jug as something that is self-supporting, or independent' (Th: 166/168). `As the self-supporting independence [Selbststand] of something independent, the jug di¡ers from an object [Gegenstand]' (Th: 166^7/168). The jug does not depend on a human subject to be what it is: `The jug remains a vessel whether we represent it in our minds or not' (Th: 167/168). It performs its essential task ^ holding liquid ^ with-out there being any subjects around to witness or assist it. This is why it can endure through history and later testify to the archaeologist that there were once human beings here. `[T]he thingly character of the thing does not consist in its being a represented object [vorgestellter Gegenstand], nor can it be de¢ned in any way in terms of the objectness, the over-againstness, of the object [GegenstÌndlichkeit des Gegenstandes]' (Th: 167/168). `The Thing' is therefore Heidegger's attempt to think an inhuman entity outside of the opposition of subject and object, beyond the appropriation of entities by the world of man. It will attempt, as slowly as it must, to think beyond this oppositional logic. Heidegger, like Lacan,27 states explicitly that this is precisely what was intended by the traditional philosophical notion of `the thing in itself ' (das Ding an sich), although even Kant's philosophy was not adequate to this intention (Th: 177/178). `The thing' is the thing in itself, and not in the way that it appears for us (Th: 167/169).28 For Heidegger, what the jug is, the only thing that it can be apart from our human apprehension of it, is a vessel, holder or container: `no representation of what is present in the sense of what stands forth and of what stands over against as an object, ever reaches to the thing qua thing. The jug's thingness resides in its being qua vessel [GefÌÞ]' (Th: 168^9/170). Perhaps it would re-humanize the jug, and take it once again as a product of man's industry if one assumed that what does this holding (das Fassende) are the sides and bottom of the jug, those parts of the jug which man himself makes. We may presume that this is why Heidegger says that it is not these parts which are responsible for the jug's holding, and hence they do not comprise the essence of the jug ^ its `ownness' or `in-itself '. Rather, `[t]he emptiness, the void, is what does the vessel's holding [Die Leere ist das Fassende des GefÌÞes]' (Th: 169/ 170). Heidegger identi¢es this void as the jug's very essence, what it is apart from any reference to the subject and the object, what it is in itself, in its very being. This is what it is as a thing: `The empty space, this nothing of the jug, is what the jug is as the holding vessel [das fassende GefÌÞ]' (Th: 169/170) and this vessel is what the jug is as a thing: `The jug's thingness resides in its being qua vessel' (Th: 169/170).

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This would mean that man does not produce the essence of the jug. But does the void come into being with the human act of making, or does it precede it? Prima facie, it seems to pre-exist man's intervention, but to appear only with the shaping of the sides and bottom of the vase, which come to enclose the void, in order to utilize it as a place for storing wine: [the potter] shapes [gestaltet] the void. For it, in it, and out of it, he forms [bildet] the clay into the form [Gebild]. From start to ¢nish the potter takes hold of the impalpable void [das UnfaÞliche der Leere] and brings it forth [stellt . . . her] as the container [das Fassende] in the shape of a containing vessel [die Gestalt des GefÌÞes]. (Th: 169/171) It seems that the void was present before the potter's making but the potter in enclosing the void in clay gives it a de¢nite space in which to appear for the ¢rst time. A void had to appear in the real in order for the thing to appear as (useful) object. This allows Heidegger to say that, if the jug is the void, then the potter in no way makes the jug. He merely gives the void a de¢nite `shape', by moulding the clay around it. `He only shapes the clay. No ^ he shapes the void' (Th: 169/ 171). This is to say that he renders the thing an object through the process of making. This rhetorical reversal (`No ^') is a fairly unusual locution in Heidegger, if only for its suddenness.29 Throughout the steady unfolding of his essay, Heidegger is answering to the need to edge the audience in slow steps beyond the anthropocentric, productionist way of thinking about the thing. Being is itself the void or nothing which opens in the real and allows beings to appear. The being of the jug in this instance is the void. This void is not distinct from the void that is being itself since being is only in these singular instances of being. For this reason Heidegger attends to the singular being itself, in order to see its being, the being as an instantiation of being. In order to see the jug as an instance of being we must not approach it as an object but let it appear to us as a thing: `the thingly character of the thing does not consist in its being a represented object' (Th: 167/168). Heidegger describes being as `nearness': `Being is the nearest' (LH: 252/162). That being (or nearness) is nothing outside of its singular instantiation (something that is near) is clear from the very form of Heidegger's essay, which is an investigation into nearness that investigates a jug, a single thing: `Nearness, it seems, cannot be encountered directly. We succeed in reaching it rather by attending to what is near. Near to us are what we usually call things' (Th: 166/ 168). Heidegger is clear at the very end of the essay that a thing is an instance of being insofar as it is singular. He calls it `ein je Weiliges' (Th: 174/175), something that stays for a while. The je is the distributive particle recalling the Jemeinigkeit of Being and Time (BT: 67^8/42) and the uniqueness of the self-belonging of each event of (human) existence. Here this uniqueness is transferred to the inhuman entity. Heidegger refers to the singularity of each case in the following way: a thing is always `this thing, that thing [in dieses, in jenes Ding]' (Th: 174/175). Having reached the void which holds, Heidegger does not rest, for holding does not exhaust the essence of the jug. Holding depends on taking in and

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keeping. Holding could not take place without these. If something is to hold, it must be capable of taking and keeping: `The void holds in a twofold manner: taking and keeping' (Th: 171/173). Because holding presupposes these two, they are more essential to the jug. But what uni¢es these two qualities would be yet more essential. Heidegger says that this unity would therefore constitute the ¢nal essence of the jug. But how are these two held together, united? Their togetherness `rests on the outpouring [beruht im AusgieÞen]' (Th: 172/173). Why is this? Because there would be no need to re¢ll the jug if the wine had not been poured out, and the jug would not have needed to hold anything if what it held had not been intended to be poured. The vase takes in and holds wine because it has a spout, and it requires a spout only because wine will be poured through this hole. Thus Heidegger identi¢es the essence of the void or the holding as the outpouring. `In the outpouring, the holding is authentically [eigentlich] how it is [. . .]. The essence [Wesen] of the holding void is gathered [versammelt] in the giving' (Th: 172/173). `The poured gift' is the jug's `jug-character', the singularity of what it is as a thing: `This manifold-simple gathering is the jug's essencing [das Wesende]' (Th: 174/175).

Thing and World Heidegger uses the word `gathering' (Versammeln) to describe how the thingness of the thing is related to the giving. It is as if here the essence of the thing is folded into something greater than itself, but without which it cannot be what it is. Thus it is not as if the thing can simply subsist on its own, at least it cannot appear on its own. This explains why the thing, which Heidegger has explicitly attempted to understand in an inhuman way, even to the point of asserting that man does not even make the jug, is once again related to mankind and his world. The thing can appear in its unobtrusive, inapparent character only in contrast with something that does appear: the world. The thing cannot avoid being to some extent an object. Signi¢cance is `the structure of the world' (BT: 120/87). It is only in this order of signi¢cance that the insigni¢cant can show itself as what it is, the insigni¢cant thing. Appearance requires opposition in order to present itself, a foreground needs a background, a ¢gure a ground in order to show up in contrast. This is why Heidegger says that the essence of the jug, which is the nothing, the inapparent, the void, is gathered in the poured gift. This pouring is the moment at which the void is utilized and the wine emerges from darkness into light: the jug appears in act when it is used for pouring. It is at this moment that the void relates to the non-void, the present world. Thus, when the void is actually used for pouring, it reveals its place in a wider context of signi¢cance. Indeed, the thing shows itself to stitch together the entire mesh of the world, and it does this when it is taken up in its use-value, by being poured. Heidegger goes on to explain the gathering which the thing carries out in pouring in terms of the fourfold (das Geviert, the `foured'): sky and earth,

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divinities and mortals. The thing gathers these four together. In this way it enters and even constructs a `world' by binding these entities into a totality, a ¢nite whole. This will be precisely how the thing `bears' or gives birth to a world (L: 200/22). It orients the world around a distinctive site and so encloses the world within a horizon. The thing stays ^ gathers and unites ^ the fourfold [Das Ding verweilt das Geviert]. The thing things world [Das Ding dingt Welt]. Each thing stays the fourfold into a happening [ein je Weiliges] of [aus] the simple onehood of world. (Th: 181/182) The thing bears the weight of the quilting point which binds the manifold references of the signi¢er and thus makes of the totality of beings a signi¢cant and therefore apparent world. `This appropriating mirror-play [das ereignende Spiegel-Spiel ] of the simple onefold of earth and sky, divinities and mortals, we call the world ' (Th: 179/181, my italics). It is noticeable that the four seem to embody a conjuncture of the natural and the cultural: sky and earth, which the thing gathers in terms of the rain-fed vine from which its gift is wrung, are natural entities;30 while mortals and those gods which man has always needed to believe in, as either alive or dead, seem to be cultural entities. Thus, it seems as if the very event of manifestation depends on a certain collusion between nature and culture, on the appearance of nature within culture. Only in this way does singularity, being, come to appear. Signi¢cance must be rooted in the asigni¢cant, nature. Once again: the thing is a trace of nature within culture, necessary for that culture to be maintained. The thing reminds culture of this necessity. Heidegger describes the four as `staying' or being `stayed' (verweilt ^ brought into a certain endurance, a short `while'), steadied, brought to a stand and so to appearance, in the outpouring gift of the jug. This pouring is the jug's use, the way the jug as void manages to extend beyond itself and perform a function in a wider more human context: a world. Indeed, by remaining rooted in nature and yet at the same time partaking of an order of signi¢cance, the thing acts to gather this world and thus at the same time show itself as inapparent. The gift of the pouring is given to us in appearance because it stays: `The gift of the outpouring is a gift because it stays [verweilt] earth and sky, divinities and mortals' (Th: 173/ 175). The use of the jug, its appearance in pouring, would be impossible if it did not relate and exist as the relation between the four. Thus at this moment of pouring, the moment of the jug's appearance, the thing creates a world. This gathering, Heidegger says, is not the gathering of entities that are present, but precedes and makes possible presence itself: `These four, at one because of what they themselves are, belong together. Preceding everything that is present [Anwesenden], they are enfolded into a single fourfold' (Th: 173/175, my italics). `At one in thus being entrusted to one another [Zueinander einig], they are unconcealed [unverborgen]' (Th: 173/175, my italics): `each is expropriated [enteignet], within their mutual appropriation [Vereignung], into its own

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[Eigenen]' (Th: 179/181). Thus the appropriation of the one to the other, their dependence on each other for their very existence is the process of manifestation. Without the thing to relate the four, there would be no such thing as appearance. The mutual appropriation of the four is manifestation. This is the famous `event of appropriation' (Ereignis), which is the event of appearance as such, the happening of being. `The presence of something present [. . .] comes into its own, appropriatively manifests and determines itself [ereignet sich und bestimmt sich], only from the thinging of the thing' (Th: 177/179, my italics). In other words, a signi¢cant world can appear only because the thing binds this world together by its very insigni¢cance. Recall the inconspicuous sign which we encountered in Chapter 1. Here Heidegger ¢nally de¢nes the nearness he has been seeking. It is the relation of the four which the thing brings together: `Staying, the thing brings the four, in their remoteness [ihren Fernen], near to one another' (Th: 177/179). And we know that it is this very nearness that allows there to be such a thing as manifestation. By bringing distinct `entities' together into a one-fold, a single whole, it creates an apparent world as a horizonal totality of signi¢ers. The thing endows the entities of the world with being, which means that, as the world's anchor in nature, it allows them to appear: `Thinging is the nearing of world' (Th: 181/182). The world draws near, reaches out to us and draws us into it as world in the form of the thing. The thing binds entities together by orienting them around a unique site and so brings world as such before our eyes: normally, the world is so near that we see only the objects given context by it, rather than the world itself. Since the very nearing of the four is the very event of manifestation itself, we are licensed, on the basis of this essay alone, in identifying nearness with being (Sein). Being is what brings near and preserves farness: this stands in contrast with the abolition of distances which attempts to attain nearness with the help of technology31 and achieves only a uniform absence of nearness and farness: everything is available at the touch of a button, as when driving a car without e¡ort drivers lose all sense of distance, of near and far, of the nature of the terrain and medium through which they are passing (not to mention all trace of the proximity which joins us together with other human beings in being-with): `Nearing brings near ^ draws nigh to one another ^ the far, and indeed, as the far. Nearness preserves farness [NÌhe wahrt die Ferne]' (Th: 177^8/179).

When Do Things Exist? If things are scarce today, did they exist more abundantly in the past? Did things exist before now? Heidegger begins his essay with a depiction of the contemporary age as one in which distances have been abolished and yet nearness has not been attained: `everything is equally far and equally near' (Th: 166/167). It was believed that

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the abolition of distances achieved by technology would bring everything near to us. `Yet the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness' (Th: 165/ 167). Rather, it is indubitable that this has resulted only in a strange detachment, indeed a certain boredom, and a desperate seeking after new thrills characterizes today's `tourist'. It is clear therefore that the nature of nearness is misunderstood if it is taken as the abolition of distances. Is it not after all paradoxical that one should have thought to travel far in order to get near to things? Once more, this is why Heidegger attends to something close to home, indeed something `homely'. He will attempt to think nearness outside the dichotomy of long and short distances: `nearness does not consist in shortness of distance [NÌhe besteht nicht im geringen MaÞ der Entfernung]' (Th: 165/167). In other words, it cannot be thought by way of an abstract negation of what would be its opposite, distance. Heidegger refers at two points in his essay to the atom bomb, which he often takes to be the culminating moment of modern technology. As is his wont in the face of events of the utmost extremity, Heidegger alleviates the orthodox sensation of something exceptional: the atom bomb is `the mere ¢nal emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened' (Th: 166/168). He elucidates: `Science's knowledge, which is compelling within its own sphere, the sphere of objects, had already annihilated things as things long before the atom bomb exploded' (Th: 170/172). Heidegger states that the thing `shows itself and hides itself [zeigt und verbirgt sich]' in the absence of nearness (Th: 166/168, my italics). Thus it is clear that the contemporary age which abolishes distance, in which nothing cannot be achieved, renders the thing scarce. But does it also ¢rst make it possible, and even necessary? This would be the contemporary constellation of world and thing, whose mutual necessity we have exposed. Does the thing as trace of nature become possible only in tandem with a world which largely overpowers nature? Heidegger suggests as much in the following opaque sentence: a twofold delusion: ¢rst, the notion that science is superior to all other experience in reaching the real in its reality [das Wirkliche in seiner Wirklichkeit], and second, the illusion that, notwithstanding the scienti¢c investigation of reality, things could still be things, which would presuppose that they had once been in full possession of their thinghood [daÞ sie Ïberhaupt je schon wesende Dinge waren]. (Th: 170/172, my italics) In this way would things both `show and hide' themselves in the contemporary world. Things, Heidegger seems to say, can appear only in their own concealment, in their elision, which occurs today, and only today, in the technological spanning of distance and the rapid eradication of nature through exhaustive challenging forth and induced catastrophe. But this is precisely what technology always does: to illuminate darkness, abolish distance. And by doing this, it eliminates the tension and contrast between two opposite poles. Thus it renders inaccessible what the opposition inadequately `hints' at.

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By attempting to span the opposition, to dash instantaneously from pole to pole, and reach the other end, technology abolishes the opposition itself and therefore the very thing which it was attempting to access. And yet at the same time, since the thing itself resides beyond opposition, by destroying this opposition technology allows this thing to appear for the ¢rst time, even if only in its manifest absence. This is precisely why Heidegger classes technology as a revelation: `Technology is a mode of revealing [Entbergens]' (QCT: 13/13). By abolishing all distance, technology is rapidly closing out the possibility of nearness and therefore appearance itself, the very singularity of things which is destroyed by mass-production and mass-access to the distant. Indeed, soon, technology will have achieved the ultimate darkening of the earth, with the abolition of life and perhaps all of nature. Science, therefore, which is the decisive in£uence on the way beings appear to us today, harbours the illusion that the thing has been reached, when all its properties have been discovered. But this belief in the abolition of darkness has forgotten two things: 1) that the thing is not susceptible of this, because it is darkness, it is void or `no-thing', and 2) because of this it can appear only when everything is supposed to have been illuminated. This is the revelatory nature of extremes which so interests Heidegger, here at the extremity of metaphysics, where we dwell so precariously, under so many of Damocles' swords. If the thing can never appear in the light of day, if it is essentially a nocturnal animal, then it is only when light becomes all penetrating and dazzling that in the very blindness caused by this dazzling the thing as non-apparent can be intimated. This is the meaning of Heidegger's fondness for the analogy of the lightning £ash: an instant of revelation spanning earth and sky (and indeed, mythologically, a message from divinities to mortals), which is itself too bright to look at and yet which illuminates the world around it. This is why it is only today that the thing might appear, and appear, paradoxically, in the light of its impending exclusion.32 At the same time, this is why Heidegger does not urge a return to some `rustic idyll'. This is reminiscent of Lacan's comments on the extremity of the second death that would result from the detonation of the atom bomb: this literal extinction of things, or at least its possibility, brings these beings before us for the ¢rst time. Only just before the end does revelation occur. Today, the threat of the second death emanates from our `climate', and in this case the possibility of the elision of nature as a whole has brought it before our eyes as `endangered' and in need of protection for the very ¢rst time. The ¢nitude of nature is revealed, as technology in order to fuel its abolition of distance and darkness will soon have exhausted its resource. Fossil fuels could become extinct ^ the fossilized animals could die a second time ^ within the next ¢fty years. Thus we have ¢nally entered a generation which will see the end of fuel as we know it and have known it since the industrial revolution. But to exhaust nature's resources means at the same time to exhaust it as resource. And when the earth lies fallow, its very thingness will perhaps begin

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to peep through, to show itself in the very exhaustion of the object, as it is perhaps beginning to today in the ¢rst apocalyptic dawning of the crisis. This is the only bene¢t of the extreme we have reached today, the necessary end of metaphysics, thanks to the ¢nitude of nature from which metaphysics issued (meta ta physika). In the ending of metaphysics as the upright stance of man, the dependence of metaphysics on nature is revealed. The fundamental insigni¢cance and yet overweening destructivity of man is brought starkly before our eyes. If man is ¢nite, it is only because, fundamentally, nature is ¢nite. This is what Heidegger means when he says that technology is both the danger and the salvation (QCT: 28¡./28¡.). It risks closing out being altogether, but precisely thereby does it allow being to appear as essentially nonapparent. And this for the ¢rst time in history. How else can the non-apparent appear save by the explicit denial that there is anything to appear? Heidegger recognized as early as 1929, in `What is Metaphysics?', that science's denial of anything beyond beings was itself a revelation of the `nothing', the nothing that is being. `Rescue comes when and only when danger is. Danger is when Being itself advances to its farthest extreme, and when the oblivion that issues from Being itself undergoes reversal [umkehrt]'33 (AF: 58/343). This is why Heidegger thinks that in the past, things did not appear: `if things ever had already shown themselves qua things in their thingness, then the thing's thingness would have become manifest and would have laid claim to thought' (Th: 170/172). `In truth, however, the thing as thing remains proscribed, nil [verwehrt, nichtig], and in that sense annihilated' (Th: 170^1/172). Proscribed for the reason that the Mother-thing is proscribed in incest, because incest as proximity to nature is simply impossible once the signi¢er has been introduced, or, for Heidegger, once techne has become technology. And for Heidegger the entirety of philosophy testi¢es to the truth that things have never appeared: `they have never yet at all [Ïberhaupt noch nie] been able to appear to thinking as things' (Th: 171/172). Being has never and could never have been thought before today, until the very brink of its apocalypse, and this because all metaphysics has ever thought is the apparent and not the inapparent event of its appearance. This is why Heidegger says in the epilogue to `The Thing', a letter to a young reader, `[i]n the destiny of being there is never a mere sequence of things one after another: now Gestell, then world and thing; rather, there is always a passing by and simultaneity of the early and late' (Th: 184^5/186): objectness, the standing forth and coming forth of production [Herstand und Herkunft der Hergestelltheit] [i.e. Gestell ] [. . .] all this is necessarily part of thinking of the thing, a thinking that thinks about the possible advent of world, and keeping it thus in mind perhaps helps, in the humblest and inconspicuous matters [im Allergeringsten und Unscheinbaren], such an advent to reach the opened-up realm of man's essence [Menschenwesens] as man. (Th: 185/186) The thing cries out in distress, which means that it is close to being excluded altogether.34 This cry is sensed in the feeling we have that no matter how far

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we £y, things get no nearer to us. The thing cannot be forced, any more than being can, precisely because to attempt to understand it is to attempt to bring to light what is essentially dark. `Man can represent, no matter how, only what has previously come to light [gelichtet, what has entered the clearing] of its own accord and has shown itself to him in the light it brought with it' (Th: 171/172). This is the question with which Heidegger concludes: how can things reveal themselves to man if man cannot force them? After repeating for a third time that `the thing remains annihilated' he asks: `But when and in what way do things exist [sind] as things?' (Th: 181/183). He repeats that they cannot be made: `They do not appear by means of human making [die Machenschaft]' (Th: 181/183). And yet he continues: `[b]ut neither do they appear without the vigilance [Wachsamkeit] of mortals' (Th: 181/183). This is because the thing, while it is an entity distinct from its appearance in the world, distinct from its being, can appear as non-apparent only within the apparent human world. Is it a matter simply of waiting for the catastrophe? No, because it is only at the limit, in view of the possibility of the ultimate annihilation, that the thing can appear. When annihilation happens, man is gone and his world along with him. Heidegger states that what is required, as part of the `ethics (that is) of the thing', is `the step back from the thinking which merely represents ^ that is, explains' (Th: 181/183). This is not a simple `change of attitude', which looks at things in a di¡erent way: A mere shift of attitude [Wechsel der Einstellung] is powerless to bring about the advent of the thing as thing, just as nothing that stands today as an object in the distanceless [Abstandlosen] can ever be simply switched over [umstellen] into a thing. Nor do things as things ever come about if we merely avoid objects and recollect [er-innern] former objects which perhaps were once on the way to becoming things and even to actually presencing [anzuwesen] as things. (Th: 182/183) So we cannot think back to a former time in which we have the `illusion' that things existed: once again, Heidegger is no simple nostalgist. Heidegger says: `Whatever becomes a thing occurs [ereignet sich] out of the ringing [Gering] of the world's mirror-play' (Th: 182/183). `Only what conjoins [gering] itself out of world becomes a thing' (Th: 182/184). In other words, only that trace of nature which can be situated on the threshold of a world, only if a thing can be recognized within its world as the support of that world, can that thing appear. Thus the thing requires a world, and it requires that we adopt an attitude within that world which does not close itself, not simply to nature, but to culture's dependence upon nature. This dependence is only now showing itself, rendering anthropocentrism impossible, with the threat of extinction, ¢rst from the atom bomb (an artefact) and now from the environment (the `natural world'). Heidegger states that `[m]en alone, as mortals, by dwelling [wohnend] attain to the world as world' (Th: 182/184). Thus, dwelling, ethics, would remain close

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to nearness, which the thing carries out, which is the nearing (appearing) of world. Thus these mortals remain within culture, but at its limit, at a place where it joins with nature. This is why a certain naturalness, to be found in Heidegger's hut and his praise for rustic life, as well as in the relation to natural things, animals, plants, the elements and the folds of the earth, is crucial to this ethics of dwelling, which attempts to allow the thing to be a thing. It is only by making room for a thing within one's world that one can assist this advent. One can only act upon the human world since one cannot force the thing. Thus one must prise open the cracks which form and must striate the technological carapace of the human world, in order that the thing might ¢nd a place in which to lodge. In this way does dwelling respond to technology and sees what it elides and what its limits are. The current so-called energy crisis is a good example of this: in a world without oil how many of our machines will still run? In his `Discourse on Thinking', Heidegger speaks of this attitude, which cannot be one of wilfulness, as `Gelassenheit', an attitude which gets along with technical objects but does not depend on them.35 May we understand this as an attitude which could survive in a world without technology? A world beyond oil and the earth's exploitation? An attitude which attempts to unplug itself from the national grid of energy and distribution? In this way do we return to the notion of `dwelling' its most derided overtones? The city refuses and ignores nature. It does not even admit that it depends upon the earth for energy. When we refuse a one-sidedly exploitative approach to nature we allow it to appear di¡erently, beyond its status as human object, or today, as Bestand, a resource which belongs to no-one and which includes man himself, the `human resource'. We allow it to unfold in its own time, in its petri¢cally slow rhythms and its joyous scamperings. This need not be the `pastime' of the tired city-dweller ^ though this is what technology has made of us ^, it need not be mere `recreation' or a short break in the `countryside'. It may be a true allowance of the di¡erent times of natural entities, inhuman times, from the time of the stars, to the time of geological folding, to the time of the trees, and the times of the other animals. It is an approach which precisely `follows the grain' of nature, rather than forcing it to march to our rhythm. Technological power-tools score without care against the grain and devastate centuries.

Nature and Earth Even if they disagree as to whether the thing is exclusively an artefact, Heidegger and Lacan concur that the `thing' is an entity which appears within the human world and is in harmony with the nature upon which it depends. We must now specify what this harmony amounts to, and why more concretely such a harmony is necessary for appearance to take place. The thing reminds the human world that it is generated from and remains dependent upon nature. It therefore demonstrates that the realm of culture is not all-encompassing.

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How are we licensed to make this claim in Heidegger's case? We have already indicated the kinship between earth and nature. Does Heidegger speak of nature anywhere more than in `The Origin of the Work of Art'? Here, for the ¢rst time, Heidegger indicates the dependent status of the concept of world which he spelt out in such agonizing detail in Being and Time. World, the ¢nite jointure of signi¢ers ^ an understanding of world which derives from the Greek `kosmos' as the jointed whole articulated by `dike ' (cf. AF: 41^7/326^33) ^ cannot subsist. World depends on earth. The fact that Heidegger evokes this twofold of world and earth, together with their relationship of `strife' (Streit), justi¢es our asserting that the artwork which captures a moment of this strife, which does not elide either of world or earth in favour of the other, o¡ers us Heidegger's incipient thinking of the thing. The thing is a being which does not elide the complete fourfold of world and earth, man and god. How does the countering of world with `earth' license us in understanding the thing as the presence of nature within the human realm of culture? We have here only to examine Heidegger's descriptions of `earth' and his notion of the world's dependence on its `support'. Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This resting of the work draws up out of the rock the mystery of that rock's clumsy yet spontaneous support. Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so ¢rst makes the storm itself manifest in its violence. The lustre and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, yet ¢rst brings to light the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night. The temple's ¢rm towering makes visible the invisible space of air. The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surge of the surf, and its own repose brings out the raging of the sea. (OWA: 42/31) `Earth is that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises without violation. In the things that arise, earth is present as the sheltering agent [das Bergende]' (OWA: 42/31). Earth, self-dependent, is e¡ortless and untiring. Upon the earth and in it, historical man grounds his dwelling in the world. In setting up a world, the work sets forth the earth [. . .]. The work moves the earth itself into the Open of a world and keeps it there. The work lets the earth be an earth. (OWA: 46/35) Earth is nature in itself as it appears in the symbolic world. The earth is not nature insofar as it is used and used up by man, appropriated to cultural ends as a reserve of raw material. Rather it is the presence of that absence which is nature in itself. Thus the invocation of `earth' is evidence of the fact that Heidegger now accepts nature to be a crucial part of manifestation itself. When technology unbalances the relation between techne and physis, and excludes the natural from its process of revealing altogether, what becomes

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necessity is the rescuing of earth, to allow beings `to become re-rooted [zurÏckwachsen] into the closedness of the earth' (CTP: 273/391). The thing is an entity which has not lost its roots. It gathers world and earth and maintains a relation of strife between them, which means that neither overwhelmingly prevails over the other: The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there. The opposition of world and earth is a striving. [. . .] In essential striving [. . .] those striving [die Streitenden] raise each other into the self-assertion of their essences. [. . .] In the struggle [Streit], each carries the other beyond itself. (OWA: 49/37^8) In the face of technology's overpowering, the thing maintains a harmony with the natural material from which it is constructed, or in the case of the purely natural entity it maintains its ability to function and grow without man's assistance. What is crucial about the encroachments of nature which the thing represents is that man is unable fully to tame them. This uncontrollable thing is the wild animal or the feral portion of the domesticated animal, the unconquerability of the mountain, but also the insurmountability of the grain in the craftsman's wood. It is precisely this notion of not `going against the grain' which I believe expresses the proper attitude which man is called ethically to adopt towards nature in the guise of the thing, which means nature insofar as it must encroach upon man's world. If he [the cabinetmaker's apprentice] is to become a true cabinetmaker, he makes himself answer and respond above all to the di¡erent kinds of wood and to the shapes [Gestalten] slumbering within wood ^ to wood as it enters into man's dwelling with all the hidden riches of its nature. In fact, this relatedness to wood is what maintains the whole craft. Without that relatedness, the craft will never be anything but empty busywork, any occupation with it will be determined exclusively by business concerns. Every handicraft, all human dealings are constantly in that danger. (WCT: 14^15/50) In `The Thing', Heidegger distinguishes three di¡erent types of thing: artefacts, entities of inorganic nature, and organic entities in the guise of animals: `the jug and the bench, the footbridge and the plough [artefacts]. But tree and pond, too, brook and hill [inorganic nature] [. . .] heron and roe, deer, horse and bull [animals]' (Th: 182/183^4). The thing precisely evades and indeed touches upon what precedes the early Heideggerian distinction of objects into ready-to-hand and presentat-hand. Indeed, this is precisely what makes Heidegger's invocation of animals so interesting. We will have seen, both in Heidegger's lecture courses from around the time of Being and Time (1927) and particularly in The Fundamental

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Concepts of Metaphysics (1929^30), that the animal, even more perhaps than inorganic nature, which was at least akin to the present-at-hand without being identical to it, refused to ¢t neatly into the existential analytic's division of being into ready-to-hand, present-at-hand, and Dasein. Heidegger virtually admits as much with the tortuous, painstaking discussion of life which one ¢nds in 1929^30. Now, in 1950, we ¢nd that Heidegger is quite clear that the animal is ^ at least potentially ^ a thing, and this at the same time proves that the animal cannot be placed either in the category of the ready-to-hand or in the category of the present-at-hand. It is neither signi¢cant nor insigni¢cant. It is something more miraculous than these mundane entities. It is a mark within signi¢cance of the very origin of signi¢cance. It is a miraculous intrusion of the real into the symbolic, but the real that precedes the di¡erentiation of the real and the symbolic, preceding oppositionality itself: this is how we have de¢ned `nature in itself '. The thing inscribes in the symbolic the real that preceded the symbolic, in the guise of `earth'. It thus directs us as creatures of language back towards the time of nature before language. `Time' is not used casually here. Heidegger himself often refers to this alien time of nature in the guise of the passage of the seasons that are marked in the rings of the fallen tree. Indeed, as early as Being and Time, Heidegger was referring to a certain natural time in the guise of the exchange of night and day with the passage of the sun. Because the very quality of the natural material used in production is determined by the time of the long development of a natural object, when one builds a house on a cli¡ one is constrained to follow the folds of the geological strata of the rock; when one shapes a cabinet from a plank of wood one is obliged to follow the grain of the wood which results from the in£uence of the elements on the tree's bark as it develops through the years, each darkening of a ring marking the coldness of a winter through which the tree has endured. The explicit respecting of the material formed during this inhuman duration anchors man within the wider context of times which far exceed his own, including at the outer limits geological time and cosmic time, times which he can neither hurry nor emulate, which he cannot `go along with' (mitgehen) (cf. FCM: 201^2/295^7). The thing as singular, as respectful of the natural properties of its material, will indeed be an object of `craft' ^ another, modern day translation of `techne ', which is distinguished from `technology'. This split is indicative of how far techne has developed since its beginning. Craft objects are de¢ned precisely by the impossibility of mass-producing them and by the skill of the individual craftsman which it takes to produce them. This essence is a result of the fact that the objects of craft are in harmony with that of which they are produced. And because of the irregularities of nature, the act of craft takes skill, attention to the peculiarities of this unique piece of `material', as opposed to the homogenizing framework or procedure which the machine adopts. The craft-object is in harmony with that from which it is made. This is akin to the `nurturing' building which Heidegger identi¢es in `Building, Dwelling, Thinking'.

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Having shown that building and dwelling are one, Heidegger says: this word bauen [building/dwelling] however also means at the same time to cherish [hegen] and protect, to preserve and care for, speci¢cally to till the soil, to cultivate the vine. Such building only takes care ^ it tends the growth that ripens into its fruit of its own accord. Building in the sense of preserving and nurturing is not making anything. (BDT: 147/149) Heidegger contrasts this building as cultivating with building as constructing or erecting, colere, cultura and aedi¢care. Mortals dwell in that they save the earth ^ taking the word in the old sense still known to Lessing. Saving does not only snatch something from a danger. To save really means to set something free into its own presencing. To save the earth is more than to exploit it or even wear it out. Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from spoliation. (BDT: 150/152) Heidegger describes this as allowing natural rhythms to maintain their steady course: Mortals dwell in that they receive the sky as sky. They leave to the sun and the moon their journey, to the stars their courses, to the seasons their blessing and their inclemency; they do not turn night into day nor day into a harassed unrest. (BDT: 150/152) One achieves this by way of an attention to the thing: `dwelling itself is always a staying with things. Dwelling, as preserving, keeps the fourfold in that with which mortals stay: in things' (BDT: 151/153). `But things themselves secure the fourfold only when they themselves as things are let be in their essence [als Dinger in ihrem Wesen gelassen werden]. How does this happen? In this way, that mortals nurse and nurture [hegen und p£egen] the things that grow, and specially construct things that do not grow' (BDT: 151/153). Consider Staithes, a ¢shing village in North Yorkshire. The buildings, made of stone taken from local rock, nestle in the lap of the cli¡s, the whole village clusters around the mouth of the river and holds fast to the cleavage of the rock as it opens out onto the sea at the end of a valley carved by the river. The harmony of nature and culture here allows one to see a smooth joint between them. Nature is not obliterated but can be read in every stone. The world roots itself in the earth here, thus allowing the natural contours of the land to appear for the ¢rst time. The two fold together, they nestle: this is the meaning of the thing's `compliance' (Ring) (Th: 182/184). Here we may take this literally as the building's respect for the folds of the rock upon which it is built and the careful removal of their material from the cli¡s. Again, these folds belong to a time other than man's, a time of nature, which cannot be altered by man's

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techne. All of these times need to be complied with, since if they are not then the earth will soon become exhausted, and man simply does not have time to wait for his material to form again.36 Heidegger speaks of this manner of harmonious respectful building in the guise of a farmhouse in the Black Forest: It placed the farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope looking south, among the meadows close to the spring. It gave it the wide overhanging shingle roof whose proper slope bears up under the burden of snow, and which, reaching deep down, shields the chambers against the storms of the long winter nights. (BDT: 160/162) Heidegger insists that it is not possible to return to such a manner of building, but rather that the continued existence of such singular places is necessary in order to remind us of an alternative dwelling: `Our reference to the Black Forest farm in no way means that we should or could go back to building such houses; rather, it illustrates by a dwelling that has been [einem gewesenen Wohnen] how it was able to build' (BDT: 160/162). This emphasis on craft is often derided in Heidegger. This is all the more reason to stand up for it. This is precisely the scorn which demands `modernization' and `progress' and uses these words to justify every form of destruction. By now, we should all know what it means to be accused of `resisting progress' since this progress amounts to the destruction of whatever bars capitalism's march, or however we choose to de¢ne the root of our nihilism.

The Thing as Void and Promise While in beings other than the thing nature does not show itself at all, in the thing nature shows itself in its absence, abeyance or default. It appears there as void. What does this mean? It means that in the thing an incompleteness of the cultural manifests itself. It becomes apparent in this instance, in the thing, that there is something other than the symbolic world, and something upon which this symbolic world depends and from which it arose. In this way something appears in its absence and thus the world appears against the backdrop of the earth that supports it. The presence of the thing signals the pre-symbolic nature from which techne ¢rst wrought the signi¢er. As the founding event of the signi¢er is echoed in each individual thing, the tremors of this reverberation shake the apparently permanent structure of the current con¢guration: the thing reminds us that the signi¢er came from nothing and could return there, to be reconstituted in an entirely new world. If the world, newly revealed in its ¢nitude, has not always been there, this means that in the future, it need not always be so. Thus the thing is a reminder and a promise of the possibility that the world will change. This change would be a new sending or event, a fundamental, revolutionary reorganization of the way beings appear to man.

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This is the insight of Lacan's death-drive and Heidegger's historicization of the destinings of being. The impossibility that a di¡erential symbolic order should fully capture a real compels the symbolic world to reorganize itself ever anew around this void which it has long been attempting to ignore with the dazzling light of the technological glister. But this self-blinkering can last only until the void explodes, and we are witnessing the tremors of this eruption today in the dawning of the natural apocalypse. The important thing is not to mu¥e this event but to amplify it. If such an event is beginning to occur, what is yet to be decided is how man responds to this event. Perhaps the possibility of change arrives only at the extreme moment when a certain constellation is beginning to believe in its own eternity. This causes the distress of those things or those men who might change the world to reach such a pitch that e¡ective action is ¢nally precipitated. Or is it perhaps rather a question of contrast? As the thing's singular existence becomes more and more endangered it becomes rarer are rarer and hence presents a more extreme contrast with the technological whole which can only reproduce itself. What characterizes technological actuality is its persistence. At its most extreme this becomes the appearance of eternity, for the entire system in which beings take part. Not only are all beings to be made permanent but there are to be as many as possible. Any beings which might think of slipping away into absence are to be maintained: this takes the form of their being replaced so quickly it is as if they never become absent. This is the meaning of the almost in¢nite speed of contemporary life. The in¢nite possibility for reduplication in the form of digital data, the possibility of repeating any event by having recorded it, by its `repeat'. It will always be here. Nothing is irrevocably lost: it can be repeated exactly. One of the essential moments in the way of being of contemporary beings (in disposability according to a plan-driven consumption) is replaceability, the fact that [. . .] every being becomes essentially replaceable. [. . .] Today being is being-replaceable. Already the idea of `repair' has become an `anti-economical' thought. It is essential for every being of consumption that it be already consumed and thus call for its replacement. We have here one of the forms of the atrophy of the traditional, of what is transmitted from generation to generation. (FS: 62/368^9) It is quite clear that technology is what allows the maintenance of constant presence and maximised actuality in this sense. It is what allows culture to seem independent of nature since it allows us to create indestructible synthetic materials, out of which to construct everything we use.37 In this way does techne, by becoming technology, unmoor itself from physis, or apparently so. This obsessive upkeep of presence and activity occludes anything which refuses to be either eternal or eternally reproduced, anything for which the slipping away towards absence is an inherent part of its nature. The thing as a mark of nature is thus replaced by `the countless objects everywhere of equal value

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[gleich gÏltigen GegenstÌnde]' (Th: 182/184). This means that the thing would be anything that is either ¢nite or singular. And this is precisely what we have seen the thing to be. While objects are today designed precisely to be eternal or to be replaced instantaneously, manufactured so furiously that they need to be durable enough to withstand the pace of production, the thing is fragile. This fragility may be explicated as both its ¢nitude and its singularity. The thing will need replacing, and it will be irreplaceable. In other words, the thing is deathly. The thing cannot be reproduced because its singularity is not de¢ned by any of its attributes, which might be reproduced around the substance of another entity. It is precisely individuated by what Heidegger calls its `time-space' or `moment-site',38 its haecceity. It is by de¢nition irreplaceable, because while another being of the same type could be produced, this instance shall exist only once, for a certain time and in a certain way. This property of singularity and temporarity is expressed in Heidegger's phrase, `ein je Weiliges', Weile meaning a `while' or a certain duration. The thing is a singular event of belonging that once over can never be renewed. The thing then is inherently deathly, it is always inclined towards its own disappearance, it does not strive for immortality. This exception to the technicized whole, which cannot be overcome by technology, thus indicates something of another order to the whole: it indicates being, which is the possibility of historical change. We have said that the ¢nitude of the thing is constituted by its reference to nature. The thing thus indicates the mortality of the whole of which it is a part. If the whole occludes nature then the thing does not directly present nature within the whole. The whole, in order to consider itself a totality, is compelled to ignore the thing, or to isolate it in some way ^ by placing it in a museum, laughing at it, reducing it somehow, as even (sometimes deconstructive) commentators have done with Heidegger: `all this rustic homeliness! ^ Urbanise the Heideggerian province!' The thing is a deliberately adopted blind spot on the part of the whole of beings. Thus the thing does not directly present nature, but rather exists there as void, and it is as a void that it presents nature. The idea that a thing could stretch out into the virtuality of its own ending puts in question the ideological presentation of the whole and reveals its historical conditioning, its situatedness. `Only then does a people avoid the danger of circling around itself and of idolizing [vergÎtzen] as unconditioned [seinem Unbedingten] what are only conditions for its subsistence [seines Bestandes]' (CTP: 279/398). Ideology refers to an historical error of perspective that takes the current state of things for the way they have always been and will always be, or, what amounts to the same, taking the current state to be the telos of all that has gone before. The current state of things, having annihilated the thing which promises change, is able to present itself as eternal, in the past and the future. This is what `eternalization' (Ver-ewigung) means (CTP: 259/371). If the thing signi¢es nature, it is insofar as it dies. This would be to understand `nature' as the natural cycle of death and birth, corruption and generation, in

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opposition to `culture' as the realm that endures beyond the death of individuals, an `institution' which remains registered in a symbolic order greater than the instances of life which pass through it. The thing would die precisely because it depended on nature, on natural materials, which wither away. It is natural that the thing should die. To let be (Seinlassen) is perhaps to let die. Heidegger, after all, insists that `death is the shelter of being' (Th: 179/180). It is what testi¢es to it, `the highest and most extreme testimony of Being [das hÎchste und ÌuÞerste Zeugnis des Seyns]' (CTP: 200/284, 163/230). And death is, we have argued, a natural fact, a fact of nature: corruption, ¢nitude. If things die it is because they depend on nature, a nature which is today revealing itself as ¢nite. Only technology attempts to eternalize nature by encasing it in varnish or nostalgically placing the thing in a museum, in a vacuum that attempts to preserve it while the world around it has died: placing them in a collection has withdrawn them from their own world [. . .] ^ the world of the work that stands there has perished. World-withdrawal and world-decay can never be undone. [. . .] Their standing before us is still indeed a consequence of, but no longer the same as, their former self-subsistence. This self-subsistence has £ed them. (OWA: 40^1/30) It has no place, this defunct thing. It is de¢ned by its desuetude. It can do nothing, the symbolic network of which it was once a part, its world, no longer exists.39 It is strictly speaking `meaningless'. Its uselessness is precisely its virtue. It is useless as a tree that is not used for fuel or a deer not stalked by the hunt, and yet it still exists. It is the indicator of another world, and a world in which physis and techne were in a state of less radical imbalance. Perhaps such `signs' signify only the absent order of signi¢cance which would have made the thing at home. In Being and Time, the sign signi¢ed only the current order, and the e¡aced sign of nature could signify nothing whatsoever. It could not partake of the world at all. Now, in the form of the thing, it can. And what it signi¢es is another, dead order, and it thereby signi¢es the possibility of a future.40 Today the earth is no longer silent. Today, at last, there are voices which amplify for us the distress of nature. Should we not understand this distress as the call of being in its occlusion? Being cries out with the voice of nature, as that ¢nite real which today gives the lie to the anthropic plundering and devastation of the earth. The imbalance of beings and being, of techne and physis, has ^ with technology ^ reached such a level that it threatens the death of both, the death of the entire natural cycle, `second death' and the death of culture. This is the mania of the current regime of technological production: it gleefully, insanely tears towards its own cessation. What man created has become a terrifying automaton.

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The denial of ¢nitude, in favour of eternalization, the hubris of man's product, technology, the slipping of the machine's leash, is now, like Icarus, threatened with the sun, and a fall to its death in the overheated seas.

Transition In this chapter we have considered the thing and therefore being, from a genetic perspective. We have shown the thing to indicate that the event of being originates in nature. In the next chapter, we consider the necessity of the thing to the formation of actual signi¢cation from a `transcendental' or philosophical perspective. The thing is not just a chronological condition of possibility, but a synchronic condition of signi¢cation's actuality. In other words, in this chapter we have not been su¤ciently explicit as to how the thing allows a world to acquire a de¢nite signi¢cation. All we have said is that the thing constitutes an orienting centre which spreads a horizon around a certain region of beings to form a world. In Chapter 3, we remedy this by way of a comparison between Heidegger's theory of signi¢cation and that of Levinas. We choose Levinas because he above all believes that the event of being takes place without needing a void in beings as a whole, which void we have shown to be the absent presence of nature. In short, if we have taken an anthropological, evolutionary approach to the thing in this chapter by charting the genesis of culture from nature, in the next chapter we adopt a fully `philosophical' approach and examine the synchronic necessity for the thing as an opening onto nature in order for the event of manifestation to take place. This will allow us to be more precise as to how the presence of a void allows signi¢cation to take on a de¢nite character.41

Chapter 3

Levinas and Heidegger: The One and the Incompleteness of Beings

In Chapter 1 we demonstrated how Heidegger came to realize the necessity of the thing to the thought of being. In Chapter 2 we showed how this thing rooted the world of being in nature. We showed that the chronological time in which being unfolds implied that some trace of nature had to remain even in its most alienated technical products. But can we prove the necessity of the thing without taking this quasi-anthropological approach? If we now return to the standpoint which we found the later Heidegger to reach in Chapter 1, can we show that the thing is logically necessary to signi¢cation, from the perspective not of nature but of culture? We shall attempt to demonstrate that any notion of beings as a whole thinks that whole on the model of the human being and thus anthropomorphizes the whole. More precisely it models beings as a whole on the unity of the human ego, the image which the human being has of his own completeness. Crucially, this image is an illusion. Thus we show that any non-anthropomorphic vision of beings as a whole must posit this whole to be incomplete; in other words, as not whole at all. Exemplary of this anthropomorphic approach to the whole is the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Insofar as Derrida later comes to align his own deconstructive thought with Levinas's work, perhaps our critique of Levinas will also tell upon Derrida. We begin with a careful examination of Levinas's thought and indicate its purely philosophical de¢ciency in order to illuminate the way in which Heidegger's mature standpoint overcomes it. We shall show that one cannot explain manifestation, or `individuation', the jointing of the world of appearance into individual signi¢ers, if one begins with the presupposition of a complete ¢nite totality.1 Only the incompleteness of the `whole' allows us to explain the event of manifestation. We shall show that Heidegger achieves this explanation by aligning his later position with certain elements of Z­iz­ek's work. This will in addition allow us to say more concretely how the void allows there to be signi¢cation, how it creates a world. Thus we shall invoke a certain `logic of the signi¢er'. This will lead us into Chapter 4 where we shall interrogate the apparently in¢nite proximity of Heidegger and Z­iz­ek which we here strategically assume.

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Derrida and Levinas Derrida's `Violence and Metaphysics' (2001 [1964]) stages its own encounter between Levinas and Heidegger. In it, Derrida's prime criticism of Levinas2 is that his notion of in¢nity does not take into account Hegel's insight into the nature of in¢nity: if in¢nity is posited as the abstract negation of the ¢nite, as its opposite, then this in¢nity excludes the ¢nite and is therefore limited by it. If the in¢nite is limited then it cannot be in-¢nite. Therefore this `bad' or `false' notion of the in¢nite refutes itself. The true notion of in¢nity is not that of an absolute other that remains indi¡erent to the Same, but embraces both, thus rendering itself truly in¢nite. It seems to Derrida, that Levinas strays too far in the direction of a bad in¢nite, by attempting to think the other without admitting that one could address this other in thought and language only if it impinged upon the same, tracing itself therein. For Derrida, Levinas tends towards a pre-Hegelian `empiricism' which thinks in¢nity as a positive in¢nity, abstractly opposed to the ¢nite, and thus as an absolute trauma that strikes but leaves no mark on the experiencing ego. I shall attempt to show that from the very start Levinas was not as vulnerable to this criticism as Derrida's essay suggests. In fact, for Levinas any access to the other presupposes a One from which this access would depart. In other words, Levinas presupposes a prior unity in order to gain access to the other. This unity is ¢rst and foremost the ego: it gains access to the other by way of a negative gesture of `putting (itself) in question'. The unity of the one questions itself, undermining its own completeness and unity, and thereby opens itself to that which is other than itself. What forces this unity to question its totality is death. Levinas's understanding of death takes its mark from Heidegger's. Levinas believes that for Heidegger death precisely does not have the e¡ect of putting the ego in question; quite the reverse, death only con¢rms the ego in its power. For Heidegger, death would be mastered by the individual subject. The reason Heidegger believed this was because the only death which he took into account was this subject's own. If the only death I address is my own then the troubling otherness of death is tamed and prevented from questioning the unity of the ego to which it belongs. Thus Levinas, in order to capture the full force of death, ¢nds it necessary to reverse this ownership and consider the death of the Other.3 This is not to deny that we ourselves die but that the true essence of death, its most extreme revelatory capacity, is witnessed only when it is considered to be the Other's death. This reversal ensures that death remains invulnerable to its appropriation by the ego. Only thus can it put this ego in doubt and open it to otherness. This then is Levinas's point of departure: otherness can be produced only on the basis of a prior unity. But, this means that before there exists such a completely formed unity there can be no otherness. Levinas does indeed speak of this strange time before any substance and hence any subject has fully individuated itself by assuming its own being in the

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event which Levinas calls `hypostasis'. It is the time of the pre-individual il y a, which we shall show to be nothing besides `beings as a whole'. There can be no otherness here since no individuated subjects have yet arisen from which an access to otherness might depart: there is no death here and no whole to put in question. This is what de¢nes the il y a, the horror of the impossibility of death. I shall show that a consequence of this is that Levinas cannot say why individuation ^ the manifestation of individual entities ^ occurs. The inertia of the il y a requires an alterity or incompleteness, something of another order, if it is ever to be stirred into an event of manifestation. And there is no otherness in the il y a. It is as complete as the human ego. And in truth it will be this anthropomorphism which lies at the root of Levinas's problems. The general problem, therefore, is that Levinas models his understanding of oneness and otherness on the `ethical situation' of the human One (ego) and the human Other. In other words, for Levinas, otherness is only to be found in (human) death, and in the il y a there is no death, since there are no humans, indeed there are no individuated entities at all. There is nothing that could die and thus open up a passage towards otherness. The notion that death is the only guise which otherness can assume is precisely what Heidegger later found it necessary to contest. Levinas understands Heidegger's `death' to be proper to the ego and thus not as `other' as the Other's death. In this, Levinas clearly presupposes that, for Heidegger, death occurs to an entity which is already constituted as a totality. But, in fact, for Heidegger the most basic function of death is more akin to Levinas's notion of hypostasis: death creates singular entities, and in truth it creates and maintains them as incomplete. It does not belong to anyone but ¢rst produces an entity which can have `belongings'. This becomes clearer if one reads Being and Time retrospectively from the standpoint of the later work, but it can nevertheless be found there. It is this subtle displacement of death and the incompleteness that its always outstanding character imposes that will eventually allow Heidegger to explain `hypostasis' in a way that Levinas cannot. This is because Levinas situates death and its otherness only after the process of individuation, which is to say that death occurs only to a complete individuated substance. I say that this is more apparent retrospectively because Heidegger's early notion of death is itself not without its problems, but they are neither the problems which Levinas himself indicates nor the problems which haunt the latter's own thought of death. The basic problem for Heidegger was that his early notion of death restricted otherness to human beings. That this proved to be false implies that otherness has other forms than death. By reading Heidegger's developing critical attitude to his own early thought of death we shall show that Levinas misunderstands Heidegger's thought of death and consequently reaches some erroneous conclusions of his own. Since Heidegger is not lumbered with an understanding of the human being as a complete `ego', when he dehumanizes the event of otherness and thinks it as belonging not to man but to beings as a whole, he is not compelled to understand this whole as complete. On the

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other hand, when Levinas attempts to conceive this whole (in the guise of the il y a), because he has presupposed that death ^ and therefore otherness ^ occurs only to a complete ego, he is compelled to understand beings as a whole as themselves complete. This will mean, quite simply, that Heidegger can explain the event of manifestation and Levinas cannot. Thus by the end of this chapter we hope to have demonstrated by an entirely synchronic philosophical approach that the thing, as a place-holder of the void, a mark of the incompleteness of beings as a whole, is necessary to the process of manifestation, or being. The initial di¡erence between Heidegger and Levinas with regard to the function of death causes their respective paths to diverge, as Heidegger tirelessly pursues the hypostasis in the guise of ontological di¡erentiation, while Levinas's meditation is forced to remain con¢ned within a description of the relation to the Other, its understanding of the event of manifestation still-born, unable to develop beyond the position of his early work, which is the only place he ever examines it.

PART I ^ The One of the Ego Levinas Contra Derrida ^ the Necessity of the One Derrida asserts that the Levinassian encounter with otherness involves no `intentional modi¢cation of the ego' (Derrida 2001 [1964]: 156). Levinas thereby `deprives himself of the very foundation and possibility of his own language' (Derrida 2001 [1964]: 156), his in¢nity is a positive or `bad in¢nity' that would be absolutely other to the ¢nite totality that is `the Same', the Same being the realm of immanence which is in some way assimilable by us, intelligibility within the con¢nes of our current range of understanding. In¢nity, Derrida insists, can be accessed only in the marks that it leaves within ¢nitude, which is to say negatively in a certain way. The only in¢nity to speak of is Hegel's `true in¢nity'. It is only by admitting the absolute ubiquity of the appropriation of otherness that one will be able negatively to trace out the absolute other of the Same as what is excluded by this appropriation.4 Whether or not such a thing as this `messianic' other actually exists `hardly matters', as Adorno has it (Adorno 1974 [1951]: 247), it can still act as a regulative check on the selfcertainty of the Same. Derrida later appears to con¢ne his early critique to the work that precedes his own intervention in 1964 (cf. Derrida 1991 [1980]). From then on, apart from a query regarding Levinas's considering sexual di¡erence to be less original than the di¡erence between Same and other, he seems to place Levinas's writing as close as possible to a deconstructive approach to otherness. My aim here is to show that despite Levinas's later becoming more explicit about his procedure of `unsaying' ^ the strategic use of language which

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attempts to undo the appropriative damage done to the real by language ^ he was from the very start aware of the impossibility of a positive presentation of the absolute other. This kind of non-philosophical empiricism ^ `the dream of a purely heterological thought' (Derrida 2001 [1964]: 189) ^ was always a mere dream to Levinas, and Derrida's alarm call merely heightened his vigilance and insomnia. Derrida is more right that he knows in suggesting that the problematic of the `trace' promises a more deconstructive Levinas to come (Derrida 2001 [1964]: 165). This would be a Levinas who admitted that the other is present only in the marks which it leaves in the Same, its `traces'. Even if the word `trace' does not appear in early Levinas this does not mean that its necessity is not addressed there. That to which Levinas later gives the name `trace' is present in at least two other elements of his early work: the curvature of space, and the putting in question carried out by death. What is the function of the trace? The trace is the mark left in phenomenal presence by an absolute absence, an other which does not altogether absolve itself from the Same but marks itself there as absence. Levinas tells us that the other is neither entirely present nor entirely absent but rather `accessible in its trace' (GP: 137/DVI: 107). A trace `equivocates': it is both present and absent and so ¢rst makes possible the di¡erence between presence and absence. In other words it is the mark within presence of that which precedes the very opposition between presence and absence, which precedes oppositionality as such: we have called this `nature in itself '. But once one speaks of it, one can speak only in terms of oppositions. Thus the absolute other which precedes and makes possible the di¡erence between presence and absence, the same and the other, can be spoken of only inadequately in the form of the relative other, the other relative to the Same, the other insofar as it makes a mark on presence. It does this precisely in the form of absence. The absolute other is what is absent from the Same. One can speak of it only as one half of an opposition and therefore as the relative and not the absolute other. The trace testi¢es to the fact that absolute absence can only be absorbed into presence when it impinges upon it and can be experienced only in its e¡acement: `a trace is sketched out and e¡aced in a face in the equivocation of a saying' (OB: 12/AE: 15). The fact that otherness leaves behind a clue allows the other to be indicated from within presence in a way that can be experienced by the ego: this experience will be that of an (oppositional) absence, an impossibility of understanding which will be the opposite of the understanding which reduces everything to the Same. The saying equivocates or traces: it is not the vocal `me voici ' ^ the pure announcement of one's singularity ^ which would be equivalent to one's proper name. There is no saying without a said, no enunciation (e¨nonciation) without a statement (e¨nonce¨). One must use the same general, oppositional words to speak of that which eludes language and its oppositions altogether. Thus, when it articulates itself in words, the voice vibrates between an absolutely unique aspect that expresses the absolute other without positive content,

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and a common aspect that uses the generic language of presence and can only reduce the other to the (opposite of the) Same. The face that speaks is one entity among others, but it is unique in that its very manner of presentation does not fail to admit that its presence as such conceals an absence.5 This is the only way in which to acknowledge the absolute other: to show that the Same is not all-encompassing. This admission of one's fallibility and ¢nitude, the trace-function, even in Levinas's earliest works, is given to the notions of the curvature of space caused by the asymmetric face-to-face relation, and death's placing a pre-existing substance in question. In both of these cases, the apparently all-pervasive Same is forced to admit its own ¢nitude and thus to indicate negatively the presence of an absolute other.

The Curvature of Space Levinas's notion of the curvature of space describes the way in which the relationship with the other is accessible only from the perspective of the third person. If we think of experience as a mirror, wherein we see only ourselves, only that which we are capable of experiencing, then what exceeds my capacity to experience presents itself within experience in the form of a curve or distortion in this mirror.6 A curve in the mirror indicates that there is something behind it which the egological image obscures. We do not need to presuppose a direct traumatic access to this otherness: experience is necessarily appropriative. But, within this experience there can be experiences which put the certainty of this experience in doubt. The face-to-face seems at ¢rst sight to express an intense ¢rst-personal experience which one undergoes only while actually partaking of the relationship. But this is undermined by Levinas's description of the face-to-face in terms of curvature. If we are speaking of experience then we are speaking phenomenologically, and the only phenomenal mark which the face leaves is in the view (to the extent) that (it) remains outside the relationship and (to the extent) that (it) sees only a distortion in an otherwise homogeneous space. The curvature is a refraction. A £at egoic mirror would re£ect the rays back directly, thus indicating the object of experience to be entirely comprehensible. But the asymmetric relation with the other refracts the rays of light that are directed at it by the subject's understanding, demonstrating a resistance to understanding's appropriation. But in this case we cannot `gather' the meaning of what is going on between the One and the Other, the ¢rst and second person. It is a meaningless blemish on our otherwise meaningful experience. There is something singular passing between them (passing between us) but in no way can we understand it. We merely know that it exists. The £at mirror is bent by the intersubjective relation and light refracted in a way that demonstrates the elision of an other within and by experience itself. What is causing the refraction, the real traumatic nucleus of the distortion, is never directly visible and escapes all representation.

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And it is not as if we do actually encounter such an otherness when we are ourselves within a face-to-face. Only later will it become apparent that something singular took place which we cannot render rationally explicable. We are never simply in the second person, `tu' or `vous', but always already third personal, `il ', seeing the Other as if we stood outside the relation. We see the Other only as that which we can never see, which will be apparent within experience only as a bump that has been carpeted over.7 The real beyond egological images and symbols is visible only in its e¡ects, in the introduction of something that is invisible from the outside but palpably so. Levinas is often thought ^ by Derrida, so it seems ^ to say that philosophy as ontology can only £atten out this curvature and exclude the other absolutely. This is incorrect. Ontology can survey a curved mirror: all that matters to it is that all beings have a common trait, such that one can say something about `beings as such and as a whole'. This means that the re£ected ¢eld must constitute a homogeneous surface or a mirror without cracks. The mirror of experience never cracks, it only bends, and ontology can register this distortion.

Ethics and Ontology Levinas regards the attitude which does not forget the limits of the Same as `ethics', and that which does forget as `ontology'. Thus it seems as if we have a simple opposition, an opposition between `other and same'. But Levinas is more subtle than this. His discourse is an attempt to access the other in its trace such that one acknowledges this trace to betray the absolute other by making it into the relative other. This will surely mean that ethics and ontology are not opposed but mutually presuppose one another and that it is only in a certain attitude on the part of ontology that the absolute other can be hinted at. An absolute other to beings as a whole must be e¡aced if this whole is to constitute a totality and philosophy as the science of beings as a totality is to commence. Hence metaphysics' reduction of the outside to a god who is the external guarantor of beings. This amounts to the Aufhebung. In other words, that which remains quite indi¡erent to the system of oppositions is taken as the condition of possibility for this system. It is the presumption of this neutral position on the part of the phenomenologist that leads Levinas not to criticize phenomenological ontology but to indicate that it does not naturally encompass its own conditions of possibility; or rather, that it can understand the other only in the form of its own condition of possibility. Ethics is ¢rst philosophy because it attends to the erasure of the other that founds ontology, it therefore addresses the precondition of ontology.8 But ontology can describe the curvature which indicates the elision that ontology carries out. It knows that the distortion in its mirror must be caused by something beyond the mirror and hostile to the mirror. Ontology cannot describe what this traumatic force is, but nothing can. What language, and this includes ontological and ethical language, can describe are the precise discursive e¡ects which

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such a trauma has, the manner in which it traces itself in the Same. Hence Levinas's prima facie absurd procedure of o¡ering a phenomenology of the other. This is all one can o¡er, and Levinas knows it, even if he does not always show that he knows it. To be convinced that Levinas speaks of the other only as an experienceable trace, let us now examine the second way in which he describes the negative opening to the other, `la mise en question' perpetrated by death. No doubt a reaction to his early training in the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, this is the very earliest form in which Levinas identi¢es the function of the trace. He uses this locution from at least 1962 (TH: 12/98) ^ before Derrida's intervention ^ to at least 1974 (OB: 111/AE: 142) and indeed to the very end. It is an abiding axiom of his thought that otherness can be produced only on the basis of a prior oneness.9

The Question of Death Levinas's notion of the ego's being placed in question should be understood as an explication of the experience of the face as a trace, an equivocation in the Same that is supposed to be univocal. Death appears in the face, and death provides a negative way towards absolute otherness by putting the ego in question. Death is that which cannot directly be experienced. It is the only thing that the ego cannot make actual for itself. Death thereby indicates the existence of something incommensurable with the ego. The fact that the ego has a limit compels it to doubt the limitlessness of its understanding. Thus death opens the Same to the other, and it reveals that the very possibility of the Same is premised upon the exclusion of anything radically unlike it. For Levinas, the other is indirectly and negatively indicated by way of this `putting in question'. `Freedom [the power of the ego's understanding] denotes the mode of remaining the same in the midst of the other' (TI: 45/36). The power of the ego is limited by that in which it can in no way remain the same: death. In death we simply cannot remain self-same. The re£exive loop of our subjectivity comes undone here and does not retie itself: thus the loop of the Same ¢nally opens out towards the other. It seems that, for Levinas, otherness is merely the limit of the Same. Levinas describes a relation to death which does not precipitate it and thus attempt to bring it within one's power as `patience' (TI: 238/266). One waits for death. But one can do no other than wait, since it does not lie within one's power to actualize it.10 `Death is not annihilation [ane¨antissement] but the question that is necessary for this relationship with in¢nity, or time, to be produced' (GDT: 19/MT: 21, my italics; cf. 31/35, 41/46). `Death, in the face of the other man [l'autre homme], is the mode according to which the alterity that a¡ects the Same causes its identity as the Same to burst open in the form of a question that arises in it' (GDT: 117/MT: 134).

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This allows Levinas to name otherness in general as death,11 the cessation of an entity that is already living. In this sense one dies for the other (autre) and not for the Other (Autrui) (PP: 167/344).12 In being-towards-death one tends towards the other, but for reasons we shall soon examine this death cannot be my own but must be given to the Other: `The relationship with the In¢nite is the responsibility of a mortal being for a mortal being' (GDT: 117/MT: 125). `Death opens in the face of an Other [La mort ouvre au visage d'Autrui]' (GDT: 106/ MT: 122). Death could pose a threat to the ego's power only if the latter had originally believed its powers to be unlimited. In other words, death can open the ego to the other only if that ego is originally a substance complete unto itself. This completeness explains why Levinas must understand Heidegger's notion of death as in need of reversal ^ from `the possibility of impossibility' to `the impossibility of possibility' (TI: 56^7/50 et al.). Death does not project open possibilities for my existence but limits these possibilities absolutely. And while it might have seemed that my death were su¤cient to open me to the other, Levinas in fact insists that death be understood as the Other's. This is to ensure that death is not appropriated to con¢rm my ego's dominion. What Levinas cannot see is that for Heidegger death originally belongs to noone, and the reason he cannot see this is because he understands death as something that occurs only to an already individuated substance. But this is also what allows him to evade Derrida's chief criticism.13

Understanding The fact that death can occur only to a substance that has already been individuated opens up a dichotomy: either death belongs to me, or it belongs to another. Levinas then makes what he deems to be the anti-Heideggerian decision to give death to the Other.14 Levinas's misunderstanding of Heidegger's analysis of death is evident in his approach to the latter's notion of `understanding', the supposed mark of Dasein's `power'. He translates `Verstehen' as `compre¨hension' and thus clearly takes understanding to be a faculty of power and appropriation. What is understanding's crime? It cannot simply be the grasping of death as an actuality, bringing it before us in a form which we can control and comprehend, for Heidegger insists that understanding is not a grasping but a projection of possibilities. Death is the origin of projection in that it is never actual but an always impending possibility. In fact, I would like to suggest that it is most originally an actuality and cannot be brought within the grasp of the understanding as such an actuality. Thus, Heidegger's description of death as a possibility is made only from the standpoint of understanding. From the standpoint of mood, which one would have to say, problematically, is more originary, death is an actuality. For Heidegger, actual death is the very origin of our singularity. Crucially, this notion of death means that the understanding `ego' is never

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complete. There is, as Heidegger says, `always something outstanding'. Thus, far from occurring to an ego that would already be complete, death creates a subject that is always incomplete, open at either end onto the otherness that is its birth and death. And what reminds it of this openness is precisely that `alien voice' ( fremde Stimme) known as conscience (BT: 321/277). Thus there are two forms of death in Heidegger's discourse. There is the actual event of death which will eventually happen to everyone ^ which is why Heidegger describes it as das Man's understanding of death15 ^ and there is the existential response to this death which makes it my death. The ¢rst form of death is not mine since it creates a sphere of mineness ( Jemeinigkeit) in the very ¢rst place. In the ¢rst case, death is a fact, in the second a possibility. Actual death allows there to be such a thing as `Dasein'. Only because man is ¢nite can he be Da-sein, the site of manifestation. So death is not ¢rst something that must belong to someone: it is an anonymous event which creates belonging. It is an otherness before subjectivity which triggers the individuation of subjects. It is a strange, wandering event, coming at us from out of beings as a whole and testifying to a negativity within the whole. Individuation occurs as an appropriation of an event that does not belong, that is no-one's property. This event will eventually be written by Heidegger as the `event of appropriation' (Ereignis).16 What Levinas misses in Heidegger is this notion of actual death.

Formal Indication Dasein's two de¢ning characteristics are mineness and existence (cf. BT: 67^8/ 41^2). Heidegger's analysis of Dasein attempts to access the singularity of Dasein in each case. Man's essence is not something that can be generally de¢ned in advance but is decided only by the singular stretch which each individual comes to occupy.17 A man's essence cannot be determined by examining him from the outside as could the essence of something present-at-hand. The reason for this is that Dasein is not complete, not closed in on itself. This is because it is open to its birth and death. Death ensures that the life into which we have been born is ¢nite and unique. The reason Heidegger devotes so much time to death is to show that Dasein is in each case trapped within the only life it shall ever receive. The fact that we are to die renders this life the only one we have; and it is ours alone. Heidegger is attempting to ¢nd a phenomenological logos which will provide his reader with an insight into this con¢nement. Thus he uses a linguistic strategy which does not simply present an objective matter, as one would an ontological treatise on something present-at-hand, but which uses general words in a way that displaces their meaning so as to indicate that which is not accessible from the outside but must be lived individually. So by attending to it in impersonal discourse Heidegger is `formally indicating' that which cannot be so impersonally addressed ^ `formally' because the content of the word is to be displaced

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from the ontic to the ontological (cf. BT:151^2/116). Death coils man back on himself to form a loop of re£exive subjectivity or self-belonging: this is Dasein. Death's binding me to this one stretch of existence is the re£exivity of the self. So, for Heidegger, death does not have the immediate consequence of giving me access to the otherness of the other human being but rather constitutes my own otherness, if otherness may be understood as the uniqueness that escapes genericity.18 But at the same time, death is otherness and creates me as an incomplete totality which opens out onto otherness at both of its ends. Death would then be the absolute other which creates the opposition of same and other for the ¢rst time. Thus in no way can Heidegger be said to assert `the primacy of freedom over ethics' (TI: 45/36). The free ego ¢rst arises in response to a more originary call which it cannot choose. What Levinas cannot countenance is the singularity (or `otherness') of the One, since for him the free ego must precede the other which calls it into question.19 It could be argued that Levinas's misreading of Heidegger on death is precisely what led him to his own understanding of otherness and caused him to embark on a journey that we are suggesting is erroneous. The only way we might defend Levinas's critique is by admitting that in Heidegger death does have the e¡ect of self-enclosure in a certain sense, and that he never subsequently understands this individual to be troubled by death in a way that opens it to the other in the form of the other human being. Nevertheless, the important point is that Levinas cannot envisage a death which would precede and create an individuated substance. Levinas's failure to understand this anonymous aspect of `actual' death is amply indicated in his ignorance of mood.20 On his reading it would seem that Dasein is the devouring existentialist ego of pure projection, when in fact it is also thrown, impotent, moody, a passive reception of otherness.

Moods and Actual Death Moods are those aspects of experience which confront us with our passivity. It is a fact that we are always landed with moods. Moods reveal facts and facts are not within our power to choose. They cannot as such be appropriated since everything I gather within my understanding becomes a possibility and therefore cannot remain a factuality. Because they cannot be appropriated by the understanding, facts cannot belong to anyone. This is why I have described Heidegger's actual death as `anonymous'. We have long known that Dasein's access to death takes place in a certain mood: the mood of anxiety. This is a moment of dispossession, where we lose grip of ourselves, and here it becomes apparent to us that we are open onto an other before whom we are struck dumb in a truly paralysing experience. Since Levinas does not believe in an otherness that precedes the constitution of the One, he is compelled to miss Heidegger's notion of a death that belongs to

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no-one, along with the mood that accesses anonymous factuality. He is then forced to begin his work from the axiom that death is always a belonging. And since death must be owned, the only way to ensure that death opens me to otherness is to reverse the ownership of death. In this reversal, an anonymous fact is rendered a belonging. While seeking to ensure that one's relation to death is not appropriative, at a deeper level Levinas repeats the appropriation by bestowing upon death propriety as such. Levinas's discourse slips from the otherness of death to the death of the Other.21 Thus what purports to be `absolutely other' is not: it belongs to humanity. This has the e¡ect of con¢ning otherness to the human form of death.22 This is all a result of Levinas's assuming otherness to supervene only upon an entity that is already constituted as a unity. And yet Levinas does not take the existence of this One for granted. He devotes at least two of his earliest works to the constitution of the uni¢ed subject, in a process which he names `hypostasis'. The hypostasis is the event of the creation of a substance ^ in Greek, hypokeimenon or simply hypostasis. Is there an otherness which would precede and constitute the subject as it does for Heidegger at this level? In fact, because Levinas takes otherness to be dependent upon a prior One in the guise of the ego's death, he is forced to understand the pre-subjective ¢eld, the il y a, as similarly complete. He understands beings as a whole on the model of the human ego.

PART II ^ The One of the Il y a Hypostasis We have so far been restricting ourselves to the works of Levinas's middle and later periods,23 but these works presuppose his early work. Here Levinas describes the way in which an individual substance is separated o¡ from the neutrality of beings as a whole and comes to assume its individual being. This is the process of `hypostasis', which Levinas also calls `separation', and it is in truth the event of manifestation or individuation: being. Only in light of this early work can the later be justi¢ed in its explicit presupposition of a constituted individual as the point of departure from which one approaches otherness. Does Levinas allow a non-human instance of otherness to initiate the hypostasis of the human One, or does the il y a exclude all otherness, just as the ego did?

Hypostasis `contra' Heidegger Levinas originally intended his notion of hypostasis to supplement a lack in Heidegger's thought of being. For Levinas, Heidegger presupposed the relation between a being and being and did not explain how the two came to relate to

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one another in the ¢rst place. His own account of hypostasis is therefore intended to describe how being itself is originally assumed by a being, thus allowing that being to emerge from anonymity and relate to its own being, creating itself as an individual (EE: 22^3/28).24 However, in 1975, a year before Heidegger's death, Levinas ¢nally acknowledges that Heidegger himself at least later came to address just this question. He is said to have moved beyond the question of being in the direction of its prior grant (Zusage) (cf. EL: 71/175, GDT: 36/MT: 41). This is where thinking `loses the character of questioning and becomes a simple saying' (SR: 182/66). Levinas even goes so far as to say that Heidegger hereby `juda|« s[es] the Greeks' (GDT: 151/DMT: 175).25 The fact that this event needs to be described implies that something exists before individuated beings. Before beings there is `being', a pre-individual ¢eld in which nothing like the event of hypostasis has yet taken place. What Levinas means by `being' is in fact `beings as a whole', and since this is precisely the metaphysical exchange denounced by Heidegger we shall have to translate him a little. Levinas describes beings as a whole before the event of manifestation in three ways: 1. the il y a 2. the `play of being' (le jeu d'eªtre) 3. the earth (la terre). These comprise three di¡erent aspects of the same realm. We shall describe each of them in turn only so far as they demonstrate the fact that Levinas understands beings as a whole to be a totality without otherness. If we can establish this, it will prove that Levinas has projected the unity of the human ego onto the pre-individual realm. And we would then be able to show that this is what prevents him from providing a principle of individuation, a reason for the hypostasis. The il y a The il y a is that which is prior to all individual phenomena, the night that precedes the radiance of the phenomenal day. Its description is perhaps intended to remind us of the nothing which Heidegger encountered in anxiety, and yet it is di¡erentiated from this `nothing' by its superlative presence: `Are not being and nothingness [. . .] rather phases of a more general state of existence, which is nowise constituted by nothingness? We shall call it the fact that there is [il y a]' (EE: 20/20). Levinas substitutes for Heidegger's anxiety over nothingness the horror aroused by a plenum: the worst is not our individual death but the `impossibility of death' (EE: 61/100, my italics). What horri¢es us is that our death will make no di¡erence to `there being' beings: that will carry on, quite undented by our individual negation. What is crucial here is the language of fullness and su¡ocation which Levinas applies to the il y a, a sti£ing presence (cf. EE: 23/28). This language is invoked

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because the il y a lacks death. If death is the only passageway to otherness then this implies that no otherness can inhabit the il y a. It is this description of a positivity without lack that forces Levinas to describe the il y a as `being' rather than `nothing': `The il y a [. . .] is ``being in general'' ' (EE: 57/94). The Play of Being Thus Levinas does not believe that `besides beings, there is nothing'. Rather, besides beings, there is being: `the il y a, the play of being [le jeu d 'eªtre]' (EE: 66/ 110). The il y a is `being without beings' (EE: 57/93). The play of being is being in itself, the ahuman side of the il y a, being for itself. Thus `being' is used to designate a realm before being and nothingness have become di¡erentiated, it is the `play' that must pre-exist the interplay between being and nothingness, it is their very di¡erentiation. In employing the word `being' Levinas remains true to his necessarily ontological standpoint, while the word `play' ^ also used in the sense of `drama', the battle between being and nothingness ^ graphically indicates the strikingthrough of `being', its `unsaying'. Throughout his description of the preindividuated state of `being[s as a whole] without [individuated] beings', Levinas speaks from a phenomenological perspective. This means that he is describing a pre-constituted subject's experience of the demise of all subjectivity, this subject's attempt to dissolve itself in an element in which no entity is as yet di¡erentiated. In order to do this, he embraces the nearest experiences one has to such a thing, those which least e¡ace what experience must e¡ace: insomnia, fatigue and indolence. Above all, what we must retain from this description is the fact that Levinas adopts the word `being' rather than `nothing' to indicate the nature of the il y a. The Earth The earth is that in which the subject must ¢nd a foothold in order to establish himself as an individual substance (TI: 132/142). It therefore describes an intermediate stage between the play of anonymous being and the individuation of an individual being. The earth is the world before human beings master it and yet somehow o¡ers itself to human habitation. The earth, therefore, is that aspect of the il y a which is turned towards the human subject who must in some form already be present within it. One may infer this from the word `element', which Levinas seems to use as a synonym for `earth', `element' referring either to that in which one is naturally at home (`in one's element') or to that which uncontrollably impinges upon one (`under the elements'). The wild elements need to be tamed or endured in order to constitute a world. Thus one may presuppose that the man who could be considered to be `under the elements' is the lacking Epimetheian subject, in need of the prosthetic

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support of techne . A human subject can properly be established only when a niche has been carved out in an originally inhospitable element. This occurs by means of the scission of inside and outside (EE: 100^1/172^4), a certain resistance and equilibrium which the entity achieves with respect to its environment (cf. TI: 131¡./138^9¡.). Levinas describes this metaphorically as the construction of a dwelling (demeure), which allows the dweller to control the relation between inside and outside, by means of roof, door, and window (TI: 150/ 161). And yet, given our ruminations on techne , is this only a metaphor? The il y a becomes earth when it produces an entity that is in need and capable of e¡ecting a dwelling with the use of tools. `The element extends into the il y a. Enjoyment, as interiorization, runs up against the very strangeness of the earth [. . .]. But it has the recourse of labour and possession [techne ]' (TI: 142/151). This is not yet to have a world ready-to-hand. Again, as part of a critique of Heidegger, Levinas often uses the language of `primal autism', the quasipsychoanalytic narcissism of an originally worldless subject. There is a relation to the world other than that of the use of the ready-to-hand, and it is a relation of consumption and enjoyment. The subject in this state enjoys itself. It is in a state of uninterrupted selfproximity. However, because it is ¢nite, this egoity requires exteriority in order to sustain its enjoyment (cf. TO: 62^3/TA: 45^6).26 But it cannot risk opening its door to a gale that might destroy it, to abandon the interior and be consumed by the elements. Therefore, it must control the relation between inside and outside in order to allow its interiority and enjoyment to persist: it can entertain the element only if it is domesticated. It stands guard over the threshold. This means that the earth must be transformed into the human world. The world allows the gap between I and myself (my self-hood) to be held open, it separates the subject from itself by sustaining the subject and rendering apparent its dependence on something outside itself (TO: 63¡./TA: 45¡., cf. TI: 114/117^18). By rendering the world arti¢cial and therefore ¢t for human consumption, the subject is able to sustain its narcissism. One labours on the world in order to make an inhospitable place habitable, but once this has been done, one works in order to remove obstacles to one's own enjoyment and consumes the world in order to keep oneself going as ego. Inadvertently, however, this work, as the proper institution of a sustained human substance, makes possible the entry of the Other, whose arrival will ¢nally challenge this narcissism.27 The constitution of an interiority, an ego, lays this ego's power open to being challenged by an other ego. This is precisely the `putting in question' which we have suggested is Levinas's only means of accessing the other as such. The Other's very existence questions my right to determine everything within the world as existing solely for my own enjoyment (TO: 76^7/TA: 64). Levinas often expresses the opening to the Other as the gift of bread from my own mouth, since alimentation is taken to be the archetype of egoic enjoyment and to express my pure self-ishness and belief in my own immortality (TI: 111/113; OB: 72/AE: 91). This illusion is exposed when an Other comes onto the scene.28 If the world is ¢nite and must be shared with

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Others then it clearly cannot sustain us forever. The presence of the Other reveals my ¢nitude and this puts in question my ego's delusion of immortality. From this description of earth we should retain the fact that the building of a dwelling amounts to the institution of a division between an inside and an outside in an element that was previously pure `exteriority': this is the precondition of the arising of an individual entity. This gesture of building is the scooping out of a hollow, and a hollow is required only if the preceding element is plenary. Levinas does indeed speak of `the plenitude of being' (TI: 133/140).

The Il y a is One Thus the il y a is one and complete: it involves no death, it is the play of a su¡ocating immanence, a plenum in which a hollow must be carved if it is to know the least negativity. Levinas is forced to reach this conclusion by the starting point of his thought, the ethical situation in which otherness is understood to be posterior to the unity of the human ego. If otherness can only supervene on an individuated substance then the pre-individual il y a must replicate the unity of the individual. It must involve no otherness until man comes on the scene to carve out his hollow and invite negativity. As a totality of presence, the il y a cannot contain any principle which would explain its hypostasis. It is simply immanence, complete and inert. The reason Levinas is unable to explain why individuation occurs must be traced back to the priority he gives to oneness over otherness, precisely that aspect of his work which we have stressed in spite of Derrida's critique. In order to see how we might correct this error, we need to return to the early Heidegger's notion of death and the problems that it encountered after 1927.

Early Heidegger ^ the Humanization of Ground Unlike Levinas, Heidegger can provide a reason for the occurrence of individuation: in his early work, it is actual death. Death precedes the subject and constitutes it. It is a moment of negativity within beings as a whole which makes room for something like an individual. Thus one has a pre-individual ¢eld in which an `otherness' intervenes. Levinas's most basic anthropomorphism is to assume that there must be a One prior to the emergence of otherness.29 This is an anthropomorphism since it models its understanding of beings as a whole on man's egoic structure. Levinas therefore humanizes beings as a whole simply by attributing to the universe a notion of oneness that arises only at the level of the human ego. Levinas can then think otherness only in terms of death, since it is from the human that he departs, and this leaves him unable to explain why the original One would ever leave itself and fragment into individual entities bound for death.

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What Heidegger tries to think is an otherness that would not occur to a subject but which would create that subject for the very ¢rst time. However, he himself designated this otherness as `death' and came to realize that it is ultimately impossible to think a death that would be neither mine nor yours, that would a¡ect human beings without in any way being human. Thus, his early approach still managed to appropriate otherness, it imported human characteristics into that which was to explain the very emergence of the human. It thus committed the fallacy of petitio principii, of presupposing that which was to be explained. It invoked human ¢nitude in order to explain humanity. What is required is rather an anonymous moment of negativity within the whole that does not belong to the human being. Thus in Heidegger's later work, the sites at which being manifests itself will be singular beings other than man, as incomplete and fragile as the existential analytic of Being and Time understood him to be. The relationship between the subject and its constituting principle, and therefore the very nature of individuation, must here go unthought because the principle remains transcendent to that of which it is the principle. We have already seen in Chapter 1 that Heidegger came to see the inadequacy of explaining being by means of an absolutely exterior fact. This involved two levels of grounding ^ the grounded and the ground ^ and the metaphysical relation of transcendence endured between them. Paradoxically, as a result of this transcendence, ground ends up resembling grounded, the ground of the human being is understood as human ¢nitude. Thus nothing is explained.

Grounding After a long struggle to reinvent it, Heidegger would eventually relinquish the word `ground' altogether.30 [T]he world's worlding cannot be explained by anything else nor can it be fathomed [ergrÏndbar] through anything else [. . .] the inexplicable and unfathomable character [UnbegrÏndbare] of the world's worlding lies in this, that causes and grounds remain unsuitable for the world's worlding. [. . .] The human will to explain just does not reach to the simpleness of the simple onefold of worlding. The united four are already strangled in their essence when we represent them [vorstellt] only as separate actualities [vereinzeltes Wirkliches], which are to be grounded [begrÏndet] in and explained by one another. (Th: 179^80/181) `Grounding' presupposes two separate levels, a being and its exterior support. The relation of grounding becomes properly thinkable ^ and at the same time ceases to be thinkable as `grounding' ^ only when `transcendental' ground and `empirical' grounded come to share a common plane. Thus we arrive at a `plane

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of immanence' and this plane must be organized by a certain distinctive point, which Heidegger calls a `thing'. This thing is what becomes of `ground'. But it is not external to that which it grounds. Here there is no substantial ground, but only events, worlding and thinging: grounding, without ground. There are three ways in which to understand `grounding': 1. Metaphysics. Here ground and grounded constitute two mutually external levels, the ground transcends and is more in being than that of which it is the ground: ground is in¢nite, ultimately the ontotheological god. 2. Early Heidegger. Here ground and grounded are still situated on separate levels, but the ground is abyssal (abgrÏndlich), less in being than that of which it is the ground: ground is ¢nite, ultimately a natural fact about man. 3. Later Heidegger. Here there is just one immanent plane, organized by a certain element of that plane, the thing which instantiates a void, an exception, in which an event of manifestation can take place. We have seen this exception to be the intrusion of (the absence of) nature into the realm of culture. In early Heidegger, there remains a certain inexplicable transcendence of ground (the natural facts of birth and death) with respect to grounded (culture, being), the result of which is that the ground of being and being itself are both anthropomorphized, and otherness is con¢ned to death. `Being' remains restricted in its extension to human intelligibility, while appearance clearly involves elements that are unintelligible: `nature'. How does Heidegger overcome this humanistic separation and fold the transcendent ground back upon immanence? I think that the way in which later Heidegger understands an individuation to occur (sich ereignet) from out of a single plane is best articulated by Z­iz­ek's intertwining of Lacan and Hegel. We shall call it `the incompleteness of beings as a whole'. Here we are moving beyond our analysis from the previous chapter and asking how it is that the thing as the mark of incompleteness can render signi¢cation not only possible but actual.

The Thing When `ground' and `grounded' are situated on the same plane, the `ground' becomes a `thing'. Being does not transcend beings but exists within them as a moment of `nothingness'. This nothingness is what renders the thing a singularity. The thing dies and leaves a void in the whole. This void is being, the site from which the event of manifestation issues, the possibility of a new historical epoch. The thing is the visible cross that is scored through being to indicate its `hesitant refusal' (zÎgernde Versagung) to manifest itself (cf. CTP: 12/15). It is the actual presence of absence: being refuses itself, but hesitates, and in this hesitation it betrays itself: it appears as beings.

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The cross of being gathers together the four who give their names to its axes. These describe the lines along which manifestation unfolds. At the centre of the cross, the four relate to one another in such a way as to induce revelation. This company comprises those who die, divinities, world and earth.31 The centre of the cross is the vanishing point to which the arms of the cross point as lines of perspective which organize a certain ¢nite event of appearance. The thing is thus the organizing origin of a historical world. The thing organizes a world around itself. A world becomes apparent and intelligible as a world only if there is a `thing' within it, a singularity which situates that world as historical. Heidegger's earliest example of this was the Greek temple which organized the topography of the Greek world (OWA: 41^3/30^2). The thing is what withdraws in its modesty, but by this very withdrawal it gathers an entire set of beings around itself, `quilting' a world in its wake such that the ¢eld depends on it for its very meaning. We have already addressed in Chapter 1 Heidegger's long road to the discovery of the thing, and in Chapter 2 we have seen the way in which the thing makes signi¢cation possible chronologically. But how precisely does the presence of a thing within a world endow the latter with meaning? Why does jointing allow there to be meaning? I have said that I believe Z­iz­ek to open up a promising way in which to understand this. Let us see how Z­iz­ek relates the Saussurian logic of the signi¢er in its Lacanian in£ection to his reading of the relationship between Substance and Subject in Hegel. Thus we shall determine precisely how the thing renders incompleteness into some form of totality or `world'. This will ¢nally reveal how the thing necessitates a ¢xed order of signi¢cation.

Substance and Subject (the Incompletion of Beings as a Whole) Individuation in early Heidegger was caused by the transcendent otherness of actual death. How does Heidegger now describe this otherness? It is a breach within beings as a whole that opens onto a void: this void is being. How do beings as a whole open onto this otherness, onto being? Precisely by being incomplete and therefore vulnerable to its intrusion. The universe itself is open. The incompleteness of beings as a whole themselves, the `non-being of the whole' (Unseiende im ganzen), is explicitly di¡erentiated from `beings as a whole' in their completeness (das Seiende im ganzen): this is the di¡erence between Heidegger's thought and metaphysical philosophy.32 The fact that Dasein was earlier understood to be created and then held open and incomplete by death allows Heidegger later to think beings as a whole as incomplete. In early Heidegger, death prevented Dasein from coinciding with itself and constituting a totality entirely visible from outside. Now this incompleteness is not understood to result from a transcendental natural fact, man's death, but to characterize totality as such, and logically so: in other words, it is not a mere factual contingency that leads to incompleteness.

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If Dasein was that open totality which could never be fully present-athand, in later Heidegger this open wholeness is attributed not to man but to beings as a whole. Metaphysics, according to its initial Aristotelian de¢nition, is compelled to believe that beings as a whole are complete. Now Heidegger criticizes metaphysics in a new way: it is not that man's ¢nite view on beings as a whole undermines any metaphysical generalization about `beings as such' (which is to say, every being); the totality of beings is itself lacking. There is no whole. Since it is this lack alone which allows there to be manifestation, this lack deserves the name `being', if anything does. But since it is not itself in being, the word must be erased. `Being' is nothing but its own crossing out, which means that this void is the very site and event of the manifestation of beings: `Being itself, which can itself withdraw as such and does withdraw by showing itself in beings as such' (NIV: 218/359). `Being itself ``is'' the default [Ausbleiben]' (NIV: 214/354). Here I am invoking, after Heidegger, two senses of `crossing': transition and erasure. Being is nothing besides the void's passage out of itself, its dispersal into individual entities, which entities at the same time erase this void and form a positive whole which covers it over or crosses it out. Being will only ever have been nothing, less `beingly' than beings, not ontos on, but meontos, unseiende.33 This void in the whole, the ¢ssure of plenitude, is what allows there to be `hypostasis'. It makes room in beings as a whole for a moment's re£ection. The only way in which there could be manifestation is if the whole doubled back on itself at a certain point. This re£exivity is the condition of subjectivity, the origin of consciousness as self-presence, but ¢rst of all it is the mere opening of light, the event of appearance itself. Heidegger refers to it as the thinning out of a dense forestation of beings, a clearing that is also a clarifying or (en)lightening (Lichtung). A re£exive arc rises from substance and returns to it, creating a mirror-image of that point which re£ects on the whole, thereby allowing it to become present to itself in a ¢nite way, according to the time and place of the site: this is in Hegelian terms the `subject' of substance, in early Heideggerian terms it is `Da-sein'. It was a certain metaphysical residue that made Heidegger restrict this open wholeness to man, as if the ideal were still a god's-eye view of beings even if such an external view had been shown to be impossible in the case of man. This allowed Heidegger to retain the metaphysical idea that being had a meaning which could be completely speci¢ed. And man remained the privileged vantage point from which to read o¡ this meaning, in a hermeneutics of his ¢nitude. But being does not have a meaning at all, not even man's abyssal temporarity. It was as if for the early Heidegger only man could be singular enough to act as the site of being, but now, any being, if it is not completely de¢ned by technology (which perhaps also means by techne , by man) can provide this site. Man has now been demoted to the mere guardian of such sites.

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The `meaning' or `ground' of being is void. But why does the void leave a trace of itself within beings as a whole? How do we get from the incompleteness of beings to the thing? Why, if beings are incomplete, is there such a thing as the relational totality of the world? Why does incompleteness temporarily give the impression of being a totality? Why does the thing give birth to a ¢nite world ? We shall sketch an answer to these questions by way of the logic of the signi¢er. The Logic of the Signi¢er (the Thing as Point de Capiton) Saussure de¢ned the signi¢er in two ways: as di¡erentially de¢ned and as enjoying an arbitrary relation with its signi¢ed. Perhaps Lacan's most signi¢cant addition to Saussure's well-known logic of the signi¢er is the point de capiton.34 This is the `button tie' that actually quilts together the two otherwise independent sheets of signi¢ers and signi¢eds, thus restricting the signi¢er's arbitrariness. For Lacan it is not the case that there is no link between signi¢er and signi¢ed, but rather, signi¢cation takes place by means of a logically prior movement of `sewing' which anchors the signi¢er at certain points in the signi¢ed. This movement originates in the individual, in his intention to mean something or to express a need. The requirement to use signi¢ers in order to enunciate these needs forces him to delve into the common store of signi¢ers. This in turn forces the subject to get involved in the signi¢er and constitutes him as a subject of the signi¢er, subjected to it, dependent on it for the resources with which to express himself. The particular signi¢ers which he ¢nds e¡ective in acquiring the objects of his various needs allow him to assign a certain provisional meaning to the signi¢ers he emits. Thus his individual intention ¢xes the signi¢eds of certain signi¢ers once it has irrupted into the chain of signi¢ers. Let us see how this works in terms of an individual sentence. The meaning of a chain of signi¢ers is ¢xed retroactively: a signi¢er is taken by the individual's intention from later in the chain to a point earlier in the chain, thus marking the end and the beginning of a unit of sense. Concretely speaking, this means that the individual's meaning is expressed by emitting a chain of signi¢ers and then punctuating them, ultimately with a full-stop or suchlike, which then limits the possible spread of meanings that these signi¢ers might have had, at least enough to get the subject's meaning across to his interlocutor. The meaning of a sentence is ¢xed only when its full stop has been reached. Where this punctuation mark is placed is determined by the individual speaker who intends to communicate something by what he says: this delimitation of a ¢nite totality ¢xes the meaning of the signi¢ers within that totality. Thus it is not as if the signi¢er as such is limited: it is in¢nite. But the subject, by meaning something, by injecting himself into the signi¢er can produce a limited, ¢nite totality, within whose restricted economy the meanings of individual signi¢ers

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are not in¢nite but are restricted within boundaries that are acceptable for communication to take place. Signi¢ers are di¡erentially de¢ned: they may be individuated not by virtue of any positive content of their own but by the ways in which they di¡er from other signi¢ers. We have seen this already in the case of Heidegger's world. Therefore, if the meaning of a signi¢er is to be ¢xed, the totality of signi¢ers must be limited. And this limit is provided by the particular intention-to-say (vouloir-dire) of the individual. This factual need inserts a moment of sameness or actuality into a realm (signi¢ers) where hitherto only di¡erence and its in¢nite di¡erentiality held sway. The subject's `meaning' determines the points in the chain of signi¢ers where the limits should be set and the totality de¢ned. Graphically, these would be the upward and downward entry-points of the intentional thread, as it takes a signi¢er and ties it back to an earlier point in the sentence, thus creating a limited totality within the in¢nite realm of the signi¢er. This institution of totality halts the di¡erential spreading of the signi¢ers and thus ¢xes their signi¢eds. Laclau and Mou¡e provide a useful way in which to understand these meaningless signi¢ers which act as limit points to the di¡erential ¢eld. They are `empty signi¢ers'. Let us link this with Derrida's notion of those insigni¢cant marks and spaces which abound in writing and which, while not meaning anything themselves, are absolutely crucial to the formation of sense, such as the full-stop. Because the signi¢er is empty or without meaning it is not di¡erentially de¢ned and thus constitutes an internal limit to di¡erentiality itself. Thus, the empty signi¢er totalizes the signi¢ers. Laclau and Mou¡e themselves describe this signi¢er as analogous to Lacan's point de capiton where the subject enters the signi¢er (Laclau and Mou¡e 1985: 112). It is in the form of an `empty signi¢er' that Heidegger's thing `grounds' a world. The thing would be a point de capiton, a meaningless signi¢er which allows a ¢nite totality to gather around it and so temporarily ¢xes the meaning of this world's elements.

Levinas's Plenum, the Whole without Fissure It is this logic of the non-totality of beings that explains the irruption of such a thing as individuated `subjects'. Because there is a void in beings, there is room for manifestation to occur. Levinas is unable to address the question of individuation satisfactorily because he believes otherness to be dependent upon a prior One, the human ego. This meant that the pre-substantial il y a had also to be understood as complete. This was marked by the fact that the il y a was described with the language of plenum, positivity and presence without lack. Hypostasis was said to di¡erentiate `in¢nite' substance into ¢nite modes, each with a death to look forward to.35 But this hypostasis could not happen if beings were indeed so su¡ocatingly whole. Hypostasis, manifestation, will happen only if there is a void within beings: in truth this void is being itself.

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Levinas confuses being with beings as a whole, a negativity that is not a being with the positivity that is beings as a whole. In other words, Levinas repeats the arch-metaphysical mistake of taking being to be more in being than beings. And without this negativity, there is no event. In order to explain hypostasis, and avoid humanism, one must posit an immanent `other' before hypostasis, inhabiting beings as a whole themselves. The `il y a' is not complete. Rather it is cracked, and this ¢ssure necessitates the presence in `substance' of a `subject'. This gap would then be an originary `other', coeval with the `Same', an immanent and not transcendent principle of individuation. Perhaps Levinas took death to be an Urfaktum, as the early Heidegger did (MFL: 209/270), and perhaps this blinded him to the necessity of explaining the hypostasis. But, chronologically speaking, even before Levinas had published his thoughts on hypostasis, Heidegger had realized that death and ¢nitude themselves required explanation and could not be taken for granted as the transcendent ground of individuation. The constitution of the ¢nite entity is governed rather by an ahuman principle, the incompleteness of beings consequent upon the encroachment of nature. As Heidegger insists, every thinker thinks but one thought. Heidegger's path was to unravel the hypostasis and its vicissitudes, while Levinas departed from this way early on to head for the Other with nary a backward glance. They diverged in their respective understandings of the incompleteness and completeness of the human individual, a divergence which was repeated at the level of beings as a whole. The question of the Other, for all its dignity, is premised upon a humanization that prevents us from thinking the event of manifestation.

Transition We have suggested that the thing allows the event of manifestation to crystallize into a signi¢cant world by presenting a moment of non-di¡erentiality within beings de¢ned as di¡erential signi¢ers. In our ¢rst two chapters we showed that this moment is a natural one, but here we found ourselves explaining it with respect to a human subject's natural needs. We have suggested that the way in which a signi¢cant, ¢nite totality is formed is through the subject's intention to use the signi¢er in order to signify. We have risked saying that it is still the subject's thing which creates the event of manifestation. And yet our whole discourse has been putting this in question. We have said that the site of manifestation is no longer man but the thing. Thus, something has gone astray. In our continuing quest to discover the place of nature within the process of being as manifestation, we must now critically question our invocation of Z­iz­ek. We are concerned that, for all their necessity, our references to psychoanalysis risk returning us to a position we have attempted to overcome and which the

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early Heidegger himself strove to surmount: this was the position which placed the event of manifestation squarely in the human being. Thus, if we are to adopt a Z­iz­ekian or psychoanalytic approach to explaining the event, we must now temper our identi¢cation of Heidegger and Z­iz­ek in order to modify the place attributed to man in this process. We must de¢ne more precisely the relationship between man and the thing. After all, it is quite clear from Heidegger's work, even at the end, that man is by no means dispensable when it comes to this event. What we must be careful to show is that the event does not happen within man or at his behest. The event erupts from the natural thing. But man must be there to witness it.

Chapter 4

Between Nature and Culture: Heidegger and Z­iz­ek on the Thing and the Subject

Where do beings appear? In themselves? Or in our minds? This has long been the way in which the question is phrased. From the very start Heidegger will have shown it to be misguided. Presence `comes towards us', it approaches man and engages him. It thus requires him in its unfolding. It is a necessity of appearance that it have two halves, an essence and a counter-essence, a moment of sending and a moment of receiving. The event by which this two-fold opens up, the mutual intertwining of these two moments is what Heidegger attempts to think with his notion of the `event'. We have seen that in his early work Heidegger situated the event of appearance within the individual Dasein's understanding of being. We have been urging the suggestion that in his later work this is no longer the case. And yet in the previous chapter we attempted to explicate his later thought with the help of the psychoanalytic theory of Slavoj Z­iz­ek. While we may admit that human understanding makes being possible, for psychoanalytic thought it seems that something of the human also makes being actual. It was the natural need of the human individual which allowed signi¢cation ^ which is to say, being ^ to be ¢xed and thus to appear as a totalized world. But this is precisely not the case in the later Heidegger. This function, which we have described as the intrusion of nature into the event of manifestation, is performed by the thing. We shall now have to demonstrate how this is so and thereby clarify the subtle relationship that exists between man and the thing in the event of being. This will involve complexifying somewhat our alignment of Heidegger and Z­iz­ek, and therefore the alignment of Heidegger and psychoanalysis more generally. Throughout this book, and indeed at the very root of its intention, we have been inspired by Z­iz­ek: his work has made our reading of Heidegger possible. But this does not mean that we can endorse everything that Z­iz­ek has said. Therefore, we shall here attempt to become clear as to our di¡erences.

Summary Let us summarize the course of the following chapter. In it I demonstrate the way in which Z­iz­ek's thought is premised upon a misreading of Heidegger's

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early notion of being-in-the-world. This misreading allows him to understand Heidegger's Nazi engagement and later work in such a way as to avoid confronting the question of the human subject and its relation to the thing. We are arguing that the development of Heidegger's thought properly understood poses precisely this question and comes to a di¡erent conclusion than Z­iz­ek. First of all, I demonstrate that the opposition Heidegger posits between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand is a rather subtle, albeit inchoate, attempt to address the ancient problem of the relation between nature and culture. But this is also Z­iz­ek's own problem. And yet Heidegger works this problem out in a way di¡erent to Z­iz­ek, and Z­iz­ek's slanted reading of Heidegger's early work does not recognize that his own problem is at stake here, and this in turn allows him to ignore the alternative way in which his problematic is worked out in Heidegger's later thought.

Z­iz­ek's Heideggerian Shadow What is the place of Heidegger in Z­iz­ek's thought? Apart from the ¢rst chapter of The Ticklish Subject, devoted to Heidegger's engagement with Nazism in 1933, Z­iz­ek's remarks tend to be sparse and parenthetical, as if Heidegger had to remain in the background of his thought. And yet he seems to be con¢ned to the margins with a certain energy that Z­iz­ek's assertion of Heidegger's general importance to contemporary thought does not fully explain. It is our task to determine what motivates this repression.1 Z­iz­ek reads three phases in Heidegger's thought in three di¡erent ways: these phases comprise the early work, the Nazi entanglement and the later work. These three readings are interrelated in an insidious way that we shall gradually expose. They naturally pivot around Z­iz­ek's reading of Heidegger's £irtation with actual politics, which forms the topic of Z­iz­ek's only extended engagement with Heidegger, in The Ticklish Subject.2 To be brief, our hypothesis will be that Z­iz­ek's quasi-Wittgensteinian reading of Being and Time prevents him from seeing that the Nazi episode brings to light the chief problem with Heidegger's earlier work. Therefore, contra Z­iz­ek, the Nazi engagement shows itself to be continuous with the concerns of the early work rather than a sudden aberration from them; the engagement therefore also dictates the shape of the later work. Z­iz­ek is prevented from seeing all this by his initial misreading of the early work. For Z­iz­ek, the Nazi engagement exposes what is most promising about Heidegger's thought since it represents an isolated moment in which Heidegger glimpsed a radical dimension of subjectivity, crucial to the political realm, which he immediately suppressed and which is otherwise absent from both his early and later work. It is Z­iz­ek's understanding of the early Heideggerian notion of the human being as `being-in-the-world' that allows him to read Heidegger's political excursion, in contrast with this immersed, worlded entity, as the momentary eruption of a subjectivity which is radically worldless. Z­iz­ek goes on to read Heidegger's later works as mounting

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an ever more elaborate defence against the recrudescence of this madness: here the last trace of what Heidegger supposes to be a pernicious subjectivism is eradicated, and this opens the way for every kind of post-modern critique of subjectivity, in ardent opposition to which Z­iz­ek de¢nes himself. It is Z­iz­ek's reading of Heidegger's early work that allows him to argue in this way and it thus supplies the principle for his reading of each of the other two phases of Heidegger's thought. For this reason, we shall devote most time to the early work, but let us ¢rst of all traverse the entirety of Z­iz­ek's threefold interpretation. What initially makes us suspicious of this very coherent reading is that Z­iz­ek's understanding of later Heidegger, which occasionally pierces the surface of his work, is no simple condemnation. These scattered comments, often so brief and enigmatic as to leave us unsure of the reason for their appearance, show that Z­iz­ek understands Heidegger's later work as an attempt to understand the relation between the real and the symbolic, nature and culture. But this is Z­iz­ek's own problematic, and elsewhere he takes Heidegger to exclude it, early on by way of his notion of an immersed, worldly subject, and later in his £ight from what the Nazi episode revealed. In that case, how can Z­iz­ek explain that Heidegger should have come to address a problematic which was entirely ruled out of his early thought, and still more so after the Nazi episode of 1933? This fact, this symptom, makes us suspect that there is something amiss in Z­iz­ek's reading of the early Heidegger, which in any case is not homogeneous, suggesting that Z­iz­ek himself has his doubts about it. But in any case, the fact that Z­iz­ek cannot explain how Heidegger could have come to address this problematic of nature and culture explains why Z­iz­ek's fragmentary reading of Heidegger's later thought must be relegated to the background of his work. For any extended explication would reveal it to be incompatible with his reading of the early work. In truth, Heidegger's later problematic develops directly out of his earlier phenomenology, which is already an attempt to understand the relation between the real and the symbolic, which we have tendentiously summarized as the old question of `nature and culture', physis and nomos, the emergence of the symbolic human world from out of the pre-symbolic real of nature. This is what the entire course of the present work has been attempting to argue for. What is crucial is that Heidegger's early attempt involves a certain subjectivism, which Z­iz­ek de¢antly asserts to characterize the Lacanian tradition. The way in which this subjectivism turns out to be untenable was revealed to Heidegger by the failure of his political adventure. Thus, for a Heideggerian, the Nazi episode reveals the inverse of what it does for Z­iz­ek. Heidegger alters his understanding of the relation between the real and the symbolic in his later work to take account of this untenability. Because Z­iz­ek does not see that all this is at stake in Heidegger's early distinction between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand, he is forced to con¢ne his remarks on the later Heidegger to a disavowed hinterland into which he cannot delve too deeply for fear of threatening the consistency of his own theoretical edi¢ce. Nevertheless, this

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tenebrous realm contains such explosive force ^ and Z­iz­ek such intellectual honesty ^ that it cannot help occasionally obtruding. It proved necessary to mu¥e these sporadic explosions because of the questions that the complete trajectory of Heidegger's work might otherwise have posed to Z­iz­ek's Lacanianism. By calling into question Z­iz­ek's reading of the early Heidegger we shall see that a certain fundamental question is addressed to him by Heidegger's thought. Z­iz­ek himself sees, in an inverted way, that it is a question of the subject, but this question may be turned back on Z­iz­ek himself. Our hypothesis is that Heidegger dogs Z­iz­ek's footsteps as a forsaken shade, a friendly reminder of an unanswered question, which he is aware of and yet constitutively unable to address.3

Z­iz­ek on Heidegger In The Ticklish Subject, Z­iz­ek draws attention to the curious ambiguity which contemporary philosophers display towards Heidegger, endorsing him as a crucial precursor yet refusing to cleave unconditionally to his word (TS: 9). He reiterates this ¢ve years later in a conversation with Glyn Daly, his conviction redoubled: I am more and more convinced that Heidegger, in spite of all the criticism which he deserves, is the philosopher who connects us in the sense that, in a way, almost every other orientation of any serious weight de¢nes itself through some sort of critical relation or distance towards Heidegger [. . .] I think that in our context it is a distance towards Heidegger that is critical [. . .]. And it is typical that this distance as a rule takes the form not of an absolute limitation but a kind of ambiguous conditional: you endorse part of it and then you say `but Heidegger didn't go far enough'. (Z­iz­ek and Daly 2004: 28)4 One might venture to say that contemporary thinkers are glad of Heidegger's Nazism, since it gives them the excuse to hold such a position. Perhaps this is why they insist on it with such righteous venom. Z­iz­ek thankfully evades the simple ^ and generally self-congratulatory ^ condemnation of Heidegger's politics, and indeed praises it in a quali¢ed way: the Nazi engagement is a moment at which Heidegger shows us something crucial about the political realm. Perhaps this makes the usual ambiguity harder to sustain in Z­iz­ek's case. Z­iz­ek's main treatment of Heidegger concerns precisely this turning point in the latter's career, and it is here that we shall begin. This treatment reveals Z­iz­ek to read Heidegger's early notion of being-in-the-world in such a way as to license his novel reading of the Nazi engagement. What is revealed in the Nazi engagement is the human subject in the psychoanalytic sense, the subject as a void within beings as a whole, a death-driven independence from the world which makes the passage from nature to culture possible ^ the subject as the hinge upon which the relation between the real and the symbolic revolves.

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This reading in turn allows Z­iz­ek to read Heidegger's later work as an ever more thorough erasure of this subject. In fact, we shall show that an entirely di¡erent reading of Heidegger's early work, precisely in terms of the distinction between the real and the symbolic, leads to a di¡erent understanding of the Nazi episode that sheds a di¡erent light on both the early and, more importantly, the later work. It is this continuity of concern which Z­iz­ek's reading is unable to explain: this is what makes us suspicious. This approach will ultimately allow us to return the question of the subject to Z­iz­ek, a question we shall ask by way of Laclau and Mou¡e's more Heideggerian understanding of signi¢cation: they after all do not obviously identify their `empty signi¢er' with the human subject, which a Lacanian approach cannot fail to, the subject being nothing besides what is lacking in the signi¢er. The decisive question will be: must we locate the entirety of the event of manifestation in the human or not?

Z­iz­ek as a Reader of Heidegger: The Ticklish Subject It seems to me that Z­iz­ek's entire reading of Heidegger's Nazism is based on a certain misreading of Heidegger's early work: it is a Dreyfusian or `pragmatist' understanding of `being-in-the-world'.5 This is understood, in e¡ect, in a purely ontic way, as a na|« ve reversal of Cartesianism which refuses to take the `subject' as an independent substance, a monadic point whose rationality sets it apart from the irrational realm of nature. This reversal insists that the subject emerges from and remains dependent on the natural world of `objects' and must always be understood as a product of this (historical, geographical) context, rather than in terms of an ahistorical essence which remains fundamentally the same across all contexts. This is the view of the enlightened cognitive scientist or the `post-modern' understanding of the subject as de¢ned by its contingent context rather than any a priori necessary features.6 Z­iz­ek does not, in The Ticklish Subject at least, attribute this view to Heidegger without quali¢cation, as he seems to do quite frequently elsewhere. In fact, towards the very end of the chapter, he broaches the obvious criticism of such a reading and describes it as a `cliche¨': one of the cliche¨s of today's American appropriation of Heidegger is to emphasise how he, along with Wittgenstein, Merleau-Pointy, and others [. . .] enables us to get rid of the rationalist notion of the subject as an autonomous agent who, excluded from the world, processes data provided by the senses in a computer-like way. Heidegger's notion of `being-in-the-world' indicates our irreducible and unsurpassable `embeddedness' in a concrete and ultimately contingent life-world [. . .] a background that eludes our grasp and forever remains the opaque horizon into which we are `thrown' as ¢nite beings. (TS: 62)

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This entails the claim that the `world' amounts to the background intelligibility in which the subject habitually operates without explicitly being aware of it. This world is then commonly understood as the `unconscious' aspect of Dasein's existence. But this is just what Z­iz­ek wishes to oppose. For him, the unconscious precisely involves a rationalist Cartesian ego, and amounts to the crack or borderline which separates this subject from its world. It is the dehiscence separating the human animal from its environment in a way that utterly breaks from the animal's pre-established harmony with its world. It is the perversion of natural instincts into desires, and ultimately the death-drive, that impels the individual to follow his desire irrespective of the demands and limitations imposed by the real world, `the unconscious as the psychic machine which disregards the requirements of the ``reality principle'' ' (TS: 63). Z­iz­ek admits that the aforementioned cliche¨ describes an understanding of the `world' as a totality of entities which is not Heidegger's own. Heidegger's world is more properly described as `a horizon of meaning determining how entities are disclosed to a ¢nite agent' (TS: 66, cf. TS: 65). This comment arrives at the very end of Z­iz­ek's chapter and, had it been ¢lled out, might have retroactively undermined his entire reading of Heidegger; and yet he forges ahead, without a backward glance (or at most only a few nervous, darting looks). However much Z­iz­ek dismisses this reading as a cliche¨, it is nevertheless his own insofar as his notion of the `subject' is posited precisely in opposition to Heidegger's understanding of Dasein as being-in-the-world. The true power of Heidegger's thought has here attempted to breach the mu¥ing cloth of Z­iz­ek's reading, but Z­iz­ek has immediately reapplied pressure to sti£e it once more. This is signalled by a rhetorical trope which might seem to spare its author some arduous argumentative labour: Z­iz­ek `wagers' that his argument also applies to Heidegger's notion of world and not just the cliche¨d version of it: Does all this mean, then, that the Kantian destruction of the notion of the world via antinomies of pure reason does not a¡ect world as the ¢nite horizon of the disclosure of entities to an engaged agent? Our wager is that it does. (TS: 65) However, the appearance of bald assertion should always be taken charitably as a merely super¢cial impression that gives us the impetus for textual and conceptual work of our own. Z­iz­ek's justi¢cation for what is after all a truly gargantuan leap, one which spans the ontological di¡erence itself, seems to be that Heideggerian anxiety, which causes the entities of the world to slip away in their entirety and thus rouse the individual from his absorption in the world, does not ^ despite appearances ^ reveal the worldless subjectivity which Z­iz­ek wishes to recall. This is because the latter is originally worldless, it is not subsequently deprived of its birthright. And yet, one wonders whether appearances are not deceptive here, and whether anxiety, by tearing us away from beings, reveals precisely this empty subject in abstraction from its worldly context.7 The passage from which we

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have teased out Z­iz­ek's argument is opaque: ` ``death drive'' designates the ``undead'' lamella, the ``immortal'' insistence of drive that precedes the ontological disclosure of Being' (TS: 66, my italics). So, the death drive which separates the subject from the world, and forms the individual psyche as a realm governed by the pleasure principle rather than the dictates of `reality', is not the beingtowards-death revealed in anxiety because the former is pre-ontological and the latter ontological. The former reveals nothing but rather ¢rst makes revelation possible by opening the crack in substance necessary for this manifestation to occur. Z­iz­ek clearly connects anxiety with revelation in his comment that it is the `¢nitude' of each revelation of the world that `confronts a human being in the experience of ``being-towards-death'' ' (TS: 66). The death drive precedes that being-in-the-world which is subsequently placed in doubt by anxiety. The sentence just quoted is Z­iz­ek's `last word' on Heidegger, closing the only chapter of his work that is exclusively dedicated to him. But what if the early Heidegger is addressing a di¡erent problematic, and one which Z­iz­ek takes to be ruled out by his understanding of `being-in-the-world'? We are speaking of nature and culture. Since this problematic is one which Z­iz­ek himself takes to be central to his own work (cf. TS: 63), Heidegger's later criticisms of his earlier approach to this problematic may fruitfully be posed to Z­iz­ek.

Heidegger's Nazism Z­iz­ek's reading of the early Heidegger allows him to miss the fact that the transition between the ontic and the ontological is precisely the emergence of culture from nature, and that this is precisely Heidegger's concern throughout his life. What the Nazi engagement revealed to him was the impossibility of locating the site of this revelatory passage in man alone. The political failure indicated to Heidegger that something always goes unexplained when this location is made. By failing to understand the early Heidegger in this way, Z­iz­ek is able to localize this concern in Heidegger's political engagement,8 in which a short circuiting of the ontological and the ontic is said to have taken place, where a link was for one time only established between nature and culture. For Z­iz­ek this mediator appears at the precise moment at which Heidegger moves from his early work ^ in the extremity of the subjective decisionism of the Nazi rhetoric, the exacerbation of the early work ^ to his later work. [T]here is a kind of `vanishing mediator' between Heidegger I and Heidegger II, a position of radicalised subjectivity coinciding with its opposite ^ that is, reduced to an empty gesture, the impossible intersection between the `decisionism' of Heidegger I and his late `fatalism'. (TS: 21) It is this subject which explains why nature would ever pass outside of itself to form culture.

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Z­iz­ek appears to suggest that Heidegger was from beginning to end concerned only to ensure that this short circuit did not take place, that one should separate the ontological and the ontic absolutely, thereby excluding anything that would precede their scission, in the guise of a pre-symbolic `nature' or anything in it that would precipitate this nature into culturality. This would mean the maintenance of a strict `ontological di¡erence' between being and beings. This allows him to see the Nazi engagement as an aberration, a falling away from this ideal of distinction: being and beings fuse, there is a subjective act which can force being into beings, and there is a particular manner of organizing (ontic) politics which would be adequate to being, to the very event of manifestation characterizing that moment in history. This politics was National Socialism: the very philosopher who [. . .] warned again and again against the metaphysical mistake of conferring ontological dignity on some ontic content [. . .] fell into the trap of conferring on Nazism the ontological dignity of suiting the essence of modern man. (TS: 13) Z­iz­ek suggests that we need to understand `the hidden complicity between the ontological indi¡erence towards concrete social systems [which Heidegger generally displayed] [. . .] and the secret privileging of a concrete socio-political model [. . .] as closer to the ontological truth of our epoch' (TS: 14). The problem lies in this very expectation that a political movement that will directly refer to its historico-ontological foundation is possible [. . .] what Heidegger seems unable to endorse is a concrete political engagement that would accept its necessary, constitutive blindness ^ as if the moment we acknowledge the gap separating the awareness of the ontological horizon from ontic engagement, any ontic engagement is depreciated. (TS: 14^15) Z­iz­ek has just referred to Heidegger's idealized version of Nazism, a Nazism which would shed its `ontic' shell of biologistic racism and be endorsed as an ontological politics, one which actually attempts to stage an encounter between the human being and the ever growing dominance of global technology (cf. IM: 213/152). He seems to be arguing that the impossibility of deriving a politics from an ontology should not depreciate a political intervention as a merely `pragmatic' move. This would be the doctrine of the post-modernism Z­iz­ek reviles, for which politics is inevitably an ontic compromise of ontology, the latter issuing an ethical injunction to which no political act can adequately respond: politics involves a mass of individuals who are each treated as the same, in calculations and majorities, while ethics is concerned with the singularity of each one. To understand how Z­iz­ek goes beyond this depreciation of the political we must graft on another of his suggestions. This is made from a Hegelian perspective and asserts the necessity for a certain onticity that would not partake of a

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dichotomy with the ontological and consequently be depreciated by its subordinate position within the ontological di¡erence: when Z­iz­ek describes an engagement as `without ontological guarantee' he cannot be agreeing with the post-modernists. Rather, he must be saying that there is something involved in the political which precedes the ontological distinction itself ^ as the worldless subject does ^ and may be described as `ontic' only by analogy. Z­iz­ek suggests that Heidegger's repetition of the individual assumption of authenticity at the collective level ^ which would amount to a political gesture adequate to the ontology of the individual, a politics which the `authentic individual' could support ^ causes him to miss out the third realm of `objective spirit' (Hegel). Objective spirit is the substantial establishment of social mores in institutions, `spirit' made objective, and it is crucial to take account of this at the political level. This `onticity' is not yet the `impersonal' das Man [ontic inauthenticity] but also no longer the premodern immersion in a traditional way of life [ontological authenticity]. This illegitimate short circuit between [the] individual and [the] collective level is at the root of Heidegger's `Fascist temptation'. (TS: 17)9 In other words, Z­iz­ek is opposing the Platonic modelling of the political on the individual by insisting that while the di¡erence between inauthentic and authentic ^ and thus between beings and being ^ is valid at the individual level, at the political level a third term must be inserted between the two, or before them. One's political engagement should not bypass this third term and simply oppose the ontological (authentic) and the ontic (inauthentic), thereafter to seek an ontic politics adequate to the ontological. Objective spirit is an irreducible `onticity' and it is necessary to acknowledge this and avoid advocating a politics that is either straightforwardly adequate to the ontological ( per impossibile) or a mere ontic compromise that never rests content with its ontological blindness. In other words, if one thinks dichotomically and tries to keep the ontological and the ontic entirely distinct, one leaves out the third term of objective spirit and misunderstands the true nature of politics.10 This would be a politics that rested content with its ontological blindness, or rather it would be indi¡erent to its blindness or clear-sightedness. The notion of objective spirit, as the midpoint between the ontic and the ontological, must be related to subjectivity in Z­iz­ek's discourse, since this is what he claims Heidegger to have glimpsed in his plunge into politics and it also eludes the dichotomy of the ontological di¡erence. We have seen that subjectivity is `pre-ontological'. It must act without ontological guarantee ^ some ground in the historical event of manifestation ^ since it precedes the very formation of `being': it fuses ontology and ontics by standing at the very origin of their di¡erentiation. In this case, we can see that subjectivity is in a certain sense a third term between being and beings, just as objective spirit is. Objective spirit is an onticity which eludes the ontico^ ontological di¡erence. What is objective spirit in Lacanian terms? It is the

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symbolic order, which the subject makes possible by unmooring himself from nature and opening up a supra-natural realm: culture or the symbolic. If Heidegger's discourse elides the subject then there is no way that it could accept the very idea of the symbolic as an `acceptable' `onticity'. But at the one moment in which he believed the ontological to be capable of installation in the ontic ^ in Nazistic politics ^ and precisely by way of a subjective `forcing', he opens up the possibility of envisaging `objective spirit'. However, the disappointment of Nazism, and the fact that he saw this politics alone as an `ontological politics' caused him to turn away from this insight. He turned his back on politics and so never came to see the necessity of this non-ontological, non-ontic realm. The fact that Heidegger excludes the possibility of this onticity means that he is in hindsight compelled to view the subjectal short circuit of being and beings as an aberration which joins together what should always be held apart. But insofar as Heidegger did indeed descend from ontology to the ontic in 1933, this is the moment at which he opened up for us the truth of politics: he glimpses the necessity of empty subjectivity and might as a result have realized the necessity of objective spirit. But his turn against subjectivism led him away from such a realization. He made the wrong choice of politics. Had he chosen Stalinism things would have been di¡erent. The early Heidegger opposes the worldless Cartesian subject and yet, with his descent into the political arena by way of a certain subjectal decision that sees an impossible adequation of the ontological in the ontic, he comes to the brink of the truth: what [the Habermasian] criticism rejects as proto-Fascist decisionism is simply the basic condition of the political. In a perverted way, Heidegger's Nazi engagement was therefore a `step in the right direction', a step towards openly admitting and fully assuming the consequences of the lack of ontological guarantee, of the abyss of human freedom. (TS: 21) And yet this moment was so dazzling as to blind Heidegger to its revelation for the rest of his life; just as quickly Heidegger shrank back from this revelation and its repercussions: Far from being the `practical consequence' of this radicalised subjectivity, Heidegger's Nazi engagement was a desperate attempt to avoid it . . . In other words, what Heidegger later dismissed as the remainder of the subjectivist transcendental approach in Being and Time is what he should have stuck to [. . .] he abandoned this horizon all too quickly, before thinking out all its inherent possibilities. Nazism was not a political expression of the `nihilist, demoniac potential of modern subjectivity' [as Heidegger would later dismiss it] but, rather, its exact opposite: a desperate attempt to avoid this potential. (TS: 21) Z­iz­ek moves exceedingly quickly in performing the reversal that occurs in the last sentence of this quotation: this `demoniac' subjectivity is precisely that subjectivity which was revealed in Heidegger's political escapade and later covered

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over, while for Z­iz­ek this is exactly what should have been pursued. It would have led ultimately to the Hegelian notion of objective spirit, beyond the ontological di¡erence. Naturally, the event of Nazism was not a perfect example of the production by subjectivity of a realm of objective spirit. It was in its historical reality and essence (or rather, since this ontological division is inappropriate to politics, in its conception and instantiation of objective spirit) the attempt to close out political subjectivity and impose a totalitarianism which excluded all freedom, dissidence and otherness. But rather than understanding his Nazi engagement to be a failed attempt that tended in the direction of the real nature of politics (subjectivity, objective spirit), Heidegger understood it as evidence that no politics could be adequate to being. Thus he judged it by the wrong standards, and renounced all politics for the mistaken reason that none could be adequate to the ontological truth of the age and thus possess su¤cient potential to stir a revolution in the contemporary world of technology. This is Z­iz­ek's view. And for him, this is precisely what politics should not be doing, and to renounce all politics on these grounds is a mistake. If Nazism itself was an attempt to cover over the revelation of the subjectivity inherent in any political act ^ the decisive installation of an order of objective spirit without ontological guarantee ^ Heidegger's later work was to obliterate the very fact that something was revealed by his subjective endorsement of Nazism, something that his thought ^ centred solely on the ontological di¡erence ^ could not encompass. Heidegger would later smooth over this extrusion and rewrite history in order to depict his path as the unfolding of the single question of this ontological di¡erence. Hence his dismissal of the Nazi imbroglio as an aberration from this path. In this way, according to Z­iz­ek, `Heidegger's late ``thought of Being'' enacts [a] false resolution of the inherent deadlock of the original project of Being and Time' (TS: 22). This deadlock is `the abyss of radical subjectivity announced in Kantian transcendental imagination, [Heidegger] recoiled from this abyss into his thought of the historicity of being' (TS: 23). In other words, the notion that being sends itself to us independently of any human decision or political forcing.

The Subject So what is this subject? It is a non-ontological entity which eludes the distinction between passivity and activity that metaphysics deploys in its understanding of the human being. But Z­iz­ek sees in Kant's transcendental imagination a subjective `faculty' which cannot be located within this division, or within the division between phenomena and noumena, beings and being (which is at least the metaphysical understanding of the ontological di¡erence): `this in-between ^ neither phenomenal nor noumenal, but the gap which separates the two and, in a way, precedes them ^ ``is'' the subject' (TS: 25). Kant himself shied away from this subject, which had to wait for Hegel to fully unfold its potential.

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[W]hat Heidegger misses is the suspension of the dimension of the (being-inthe-)world [. . .] as the most radical dimension of subjectivity, as that against which the violent synthetic imposition of a (New) Order ^ the Event of Historical Disclosure of Being ^ is the defence. (TS: 50) Thus it is empty subjectivity which forms a void in nature and then again in culture, stimulating the revolutionary construction of a new world, initiating a new `event', as Z­iz­ek revealingly has it. Now, in a certain way this is what we wish to contest, and it is interesting that Z­iz­ek refers quite blatantly to Heidegger's Ereignis as the imposition of an entirely new signi¢cation for the whole of beings in response to the presence of a void within the current order. When Z­iz­ek describes this subjectal void as a `pre-ontological' domain (TS: 51), he surely cannot be unaware that this domain is precisely Heidegger's concern in his later work.11 Indeed, even in his early work, what is `fundamental ontology' if not `pre-ontological' in the usual `metaphysical' sense of `ontology'? Heidegger's concern is the foundation of man's `pre-ontological understanding of being', how signi¢cance can appear to us in the ¢rst place, before its explicit thematization in ontology. So even here it must be clear to Z­iz­ek that his question is also Heidegger's own. And yet in spite of this, Z­iz­ek accuses Heidegger of missing out the necessary condition for the emergence of manifestation and any subsequent large-scale change in the manifestation of the whole (an `event'),12 and that is the void in beings which Z­iz­ek identi¢es with subjectivity. Even if Z­iz­ek denies that this is Heidegger's problematic in his early work, he is elsewhere forced to admit its presence in the later.13 If Z­iz­ek's admirable awareness of this dimension of Heidegger's work is checked in The Ticklish Subject then this is presumably because it con£icts with the reading of the early Heidegger which Z­iz­ek's thesis on Nazism requires him to maintain. It is, however, given freer rein elsewhere. Z­iz­ek praises Heidegger for recognizing the necessity of a void in the Symbolic: `he gave occasional hints as to how his notions of Clearing and Event resonate with the Oriental notion of the primordial Void' (B: 11). `With regard to the ``draft'' of the withdrawal of Being which attracts us by its withdrawal [a reference to What is Called Thinking?] [. . .]. In Lacanian terms, this ``draft'' of the withdrawal is the gap in the big Other [the Symbolic, the cultural]' (B: 108).14 But in spite of this, he still feels able to reiterate his critique in the context of the later work, albeit in a di¡erent way: Heidegger may recognize the necessity for the void but he fails once again to carry his insight to term and designate this void as the `subject': Heidegger is fully aware that the `derangement of man's position among beings' [A quotation from Contributions to Philosophy (CTP: 237/338)], the fact that man's emergence somehow `derails' the balance of entities, is in a way older than Truth itself, its very hidden foundation [. . .] for Heidegger, the TruthEvent can occur only within such a fundamental `ontological imbalance'.

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The truly problematic and central point is that Heidegger refuses to call this `ontological imbalance' or `derangement' subject. (FA: 168, n. 58) The justi¢cation for this accusation may be found in Z­iz­ek's reading of subjectivity in explicit opposition to the Dreyfusian reading of Heidegger that we have shown him to adopt. Z­iz­ek needs this reading in order negatively to delineate his own resurrection of the subject from its supposed `death', which he ultimately imputes ^ at least in part ^ to Heidegger: the Lacanian (re)reading of the problematic of subjectivity in German Idealism enables us not only to delineate contours of a notion of subjectivity that does not ¢t the frame of Heidegger's notion of the nihilism inherent to modern subjectivity [nihilism in the sense of `oblivion to being'], but also to locate the point of the inherent failure of Heidegger's philosophical edi¢ce. (TS: 10^11) `[I]t is this dimension of [. . .] pre-synthetic imagination [subjectivity] from which Heidegger retreated' (TS: 52), `he is unable to address the excessive dimension of subjectivity, its inherent madness' (TS: 61). Thus we may discern here the justi¢cation for Z­iz­ek's later nuancing of his accusation to the e¡ect that even if Heidegger eventually provides a place for the void, he does not identify it with the subject. What Z­iz­ek does not see is that the fusion between being and beings which Heidegger's subjective political decision is held to have performed in 1933 is not abandoned by Heidegger. Indeed, it follows from the very logic of his earlier thought. This is why he comes to speak of the intimacy (Innigkeit) of being and beings, and indeed, as Z­iz­ek recognizes, of the event of their di¡erentiation from out of a place in which they were at one: nature. And yet, Heidegger displaces this `short circuit' from the human `subject' and distributes it among the inhuman entities of the world.

Heidegger's Event Heidegger was always seeking the pre-ontological di¡erentiation of the ontological di¡erence. And since man, at least in 1927, occupied the site of being's revelation ^ Da-sein ^ he, like Z­iz­ek, locates man and his `death drive' at the boundary between (real) nature and (symbolic) culture, as that which explains the transition between the two. But crucially, for him this subjectality proved to be unexplanatory. And it was the failure of Nazism to live up to his ideal that revealed this explanatory de¢ciency to him. If Z­iz­ek thinks that the notion of a short circuit is alien to Heidegger's thought, early and late, and amounts to a merely momentary intrusion that is swiftly driven away, he is incorrect: indeed, this is indicated by his admission elsewhere that the void is involved in Heidegger's later thought. This development would be incomprehensible if Z­iz­ek's reading of the early work were

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correct. The later work would then be addressing an entirely di¡erent problematic to the early, the emergence of appearance from non-appearance, culture from nature. But this precise problematic spurs the development of Heidegger's thought from beginning to end and provides its deepest continuity. The problem with his early understanding was that it located being and the meaning of being in man. Thus what the Nazi engagement reveals is precisely a potential problem with the Z­iz­ekian understanding of the void (or event) as subject. How did Heidegger's engagement reveal this? The replication of the subjectal structure of man at the political level revealed the inadequacy of Heidegger's understanding not just at the political level ^ as we have taken Z­iz­ek to imply ^ but also at the level of the individual. Thus Nazism reveals the reverse of what Z­iz­ek believes: that the short circuit should be pursued in its conditions of possibility but that these conditions should not be situated in the human being. Is it the case that Z­iz­ek's misunderstanding of Heidegger's early work allows him to read the Nazi episode as a promising thought never pursued rather than as the revelation of a drawback with the earlier Heidegger's notion of the relation between nature and culture? Through his reading of the early Heidegger, does Z­iz­ek unconsciously immunize himself against the criticism that the later Heidegger might have put to him? I have suggested that his repression of the later work, which he con¢nes to the margins of his own, is symptomatic of his awareness of this. What I wish to suggest on the basis of this alternative reading of Heidegger is that Z­iz­ek's understanding of the void as subject repeats the mistake of the early Heidegger and renders the void more unique and more uniquely human than it really is. Ultimately I think that naming the void `subject' condemns us to a humanism by restricting the point of revelation to man's `consciousness', when in fact it is more generously shared out among the entities of the (natural) world. And following Heidegger's trajectory one can see the problems that stem from locating the mediator between nature and culture in man. Let us now re-examine the early Heidegger's notion of world in order to justify our alternative reading.

Heidegger's Theory of Signi¢cation Z­iz­ek's reading of the early Heidegger allows him to bypass what is really at stake in the opposition between the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand, the two ways of being which Heidegger distinguishes from Dasein's. I have argued in Chapter 1 of the present work that Heidegger's analysis of world presents us with a theory of signi¢cation, an understanding of the way in which signi¢cant culture arises from insigni¢cant nature. More precisely, a theory of signi¢cation answers the question of how such a thing as signi¢cance can arise from asigni¢cant nature in itself. Heidegger's question of the meaning of being asks after the relation between the signi¢cant world and the `actuality' which

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preceded the very opposition between sense and senselessness. It asks how being originated from nature. Being is the signi¢cant appearance of beings. At least for the early Heidegger, before man rose up from the mass of beings, `beings' did indeed subsist but were not apparent. There was simply no such thing as signi¢cant appearance, just `actuality' going about its business, mere `e¡ectivity' (Wirklichkeit), the event had not yet taken place.15 This is the problem that Heidegger is addressing with his famous distinction of present-at-hand and ready-to-hand. The subtlety of the way in which this distinction addresses the question of the relation between nature and culture is still far from being appreciated, and this subtlety is entirely ruined in Dreyfus's alarmingly popular strain of Heidegger interpretation, the extirpation of which cannot be too strongly urged, for this very reason.

Ready-to-hand and Present-at-hand It is not by chance that Heidegger demonstrates our access to the present-athand from the point of view of the ready-to-hand in the failure of a tool. The present-at-hand entity is a ready-to-hand entity drained of signi¢cance, extracted from its position in a world. The present-at-hand is an abstraction: an entity is extracted from the context in which it acquired its individual signi¢cance and placed in a homogeneous space in which its intensive individual qualities are ignored. This reduces it to a cluster of generic properties and thus allows it to be compared with other objects. Thus, science as the study of the present-at-hand can make the valid claim that its knowledge extends over the entirety of what is. For science, there is no such thing as being: this means to say merely that science need pay no heed to signi¢cation. This way of seeing entities is as much a failure of a tool, a myopia of perception on the part of the scientist, as when in `everyday life' an implement fails to achieve the end for which it was intended. It is a form of `sight' which does not see the signi¢cance that surrounds entities in the guise of a network of di¡erentially de¢ning signi¢cations which articulate beings into a coherent totality of signi¢cations (Bedeutungsganze). This sight focuses solely on the entity itself in its positive qualities and not on the individualizing position of that entity within its world(s). Why focus on any level other than that of science? For one thing, the scientist is unable to explain the individuation of his object and to investigate it in its individuality: he has no concern for the singularity of things. This is why, as we have seen in Chapter 2, Heidegger insists that science `annihilates' the thing. It can explain the causal processes that lead to a certain state of things and investigate an entity's general properties. But that particular object which the scientist has under his microscope was individuated only by its place in a network of signi¢cations. So, while the scientist may be able to describe the processes leading up to the constitution of the entity he has abstracted, he cannot

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explain what makes this cluster of properties signi¢cant, what makes it one individual. An entity is de¢ned as the individual it is only at the level of the ready-to-hand world. But more importantly for our purposes, to abstract an entity from the world does not mean that one is then seeing the `world' as it really is. Heidegger often insists that `values' are not imposed on prior `facts' (cf. BT: 132/99). The readyto-hand is not something that human perception lays on top of facts, thereby humanizing and obscuring them. But there is no evaluative criticism of science involved in drawing attention to this. Indeed, disinterested theoretical perception is precisely de¢ned by this abstraction; it has its own sphere of legitimacy and as a result of this inherent limitation can progress extremely rapidly. Indeed, science would not remain what it is if it tried to restore an object to its world and once again bestow signi¢cance upon it. But philosophy's job is to ask whether science's object is indeed what it takes it to be, and this means not only to turn back to the world of signi¢cance from which present-at-hand objects are isolated, to ensure that science is not given exclusive rights over the determination of reality, but also to show science that even its present-at-hand domain is not all that it seems.

Nature The notion of a present-at-hand entity that could be reached by abstracting from the ready-to-hand is something that is introduced only once the readyto-hand has come into being. In other words, the opposition between ready-tohand and present-at-hand arises only within the ready-to-hand itself. How could something that is negatively de¢ned (the present-at-hand) exist before that which negatively de¢nes it?16 Therefore, the present-at-hand cannot be identi¢ed with that which existed before such a thing as the ready-to-hand emerged, something absolutely other to the human world of signi¢cance, `nature in itself '. If this is what the `natural scientist' takes to be his object, philosophy must intervene to insist that he is wrong. The present-at-hand is not nature since it is quite clearly seen from the perspective of a world in which the human being as user of tools has already arisen. Therefore, it appears to be something in the nature of an insigni¢cant world which awaits signi¢cance. In other words, it is a retrospective projection from the point of view of signi¢cance of a world without signi¢cation. It is the actual world of busyness which Heidegger would later ^ and only later ^ take to be a description of contemporary life under the sway of technology and its imperatives. Hence Heidegger's description of das Man's articulation of the world, `Ge-rede',17 as one in which `one pays attention only to what is said in the talk' and not the talk itself (BT: 212/168^9), in which one has access to signi¢ers without signi¢eds. One would not describe the pre-symbolic `nature in itself ' in this way: to understand this as a signi¢er awaiting its signi¢ed would be intolerably teleological.

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Now, the `natural sciences' naturally take their present-at-hand object to be `nature', that which is distinguished from human `culture', the readiness-tohand of tools. They think themselves entirely free from such an anthropomorphic perspective. Heidegger's point is that this is a mistake, and that neither the nature which is humanized through labour to be used as a resource for human activity nor the present-at-hand entity of science abstracted from all such exploitation is `nature in itself ': Here, however, `Nature' is not to be understood as that which is just presentat-hand, nor as the power of Nature [Naturmacht]. The wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power, the wind is wind `in the sails' [. . .]. If its kind of being as ready-to-hand is disregarded [. . .] the Nature which `stirs and strives' [`webt und strebt'], which assails us and enthrals us as landscape, remains hidden [bleibt . . . verborgen]. (BT: 100/70) Heidegger is here, perhaps subconsciously, recalling the fragment of Heraclitus which reads `physis kryptesthai philei'. Facilely translated, this reads `nature loves to hide itself '. Nature in itself is the absolute other of the ready-to-hand world of intelligibility. It is that which will have been there before the dichotomies that comprise man's symbolic world, and will survive their ¢nal extinction. This nature belongs neither to the ready-to-hand nor to the present-at-hand, and since these amount to the sum total of what can appear, what can have `being' for the early Heidegger, nature as such cannot appear to us. We have seen in Chapter 1 that, for Heidegger, if nature exceeds our world then we cannot uncover it at all: Intraworldliness does not belong to nature's being [. . .]. Intraworldliness belongs to the being of the present-at-hand, nature, not as a determination of its being, but as a possible determination, and one that is necessary [my italics] for the possibility of the uncoverability of nature. (BPP: 169/240) Thus the word `nature', by means of its twofold sense, serves to indicate both that the present-at-hand is what is taken to be nature and that it must elide nature as such due to its complicity with the ready-to-hand.

The Earth We have already seen that with his notion of `earth', Heidegger comes to think this absent nature, but he comes to think its absence as present within beings as a whole. Heidegger is explicit that the earth appears in the world as absent. In order to demonstrate this, let us ¢rst of all establish that Heidegger believes the earth to appear only in its strife with world: `The temple-work, standing there, opens up a world and at the same time sets this world back again on earth, which itself

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only thus emerges as native ground [heimatliche Grund]' (OWA: 42/32). Thus the world can arise only if it is grounded on earth. `The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through [durchragt] world' (OWA: 49/37). The earth appears only because the world stands upon it. `In setting up a world, the work sets forth the earth. [. . .] The work moves the earth itself into the Open of a world and keeps it there' (OWA: 46/35). Heidegger is quite clear that earth, the absent other of nature, has its own peculiar form of presence within the open space of the world. But it appears here as absent, as `self-secluding': `The earth cannot dispense with the Open of the world if it is itself to appear as earth in the liberated surge of its self-seclusion [ihres SichverschlieÞens erscheinen]' (OWA: 49/38). What is of the earth shows itself only when it remains undisclosed and unexplained. Earth thus shatters every attempt to penetrate into it. [. . .] The earth appears openly cleared as itself only when it is perceived and preserved as that which is by nature undisclosable. (OWA: 47/36, my italics) In Being and Time, Heidegger left nature entirely outside of the ready-to-hand world of culture. He did not think through the presence of absence ^ the earth `shows itself only when it remains undisclosed ' ^, the very entwining of beings and being. He did not think the immanence of the void to beings.

The Power of Nature And yet, despite describing nature in itself as that which is absolutely excluded by the opposition of ready-to-hand and present-at-hand, Heidegger did not in fact relieve this nature of all in£uence with respect to the world of signi¢cance. By acting as an absolute outside, a certain `fact' allowed the world of man to constitute a closed totality with a thoroughgoing intelligibility. This factuality, which was supposed to be the ground of being, took the form of the natural fact of death.18 If Heidegger was attempting to provide a theory of how signi¢cation was produced, he found it necessary to begin from nature and to seek within it a particular fact which might explain the emergence of signi¢cation: he found this fact in death ^ which resonates uncannily with Z­iz­ek's Schellingian understanding of the death drive as the vanishing mediator between nature and culture (cf. Z­iz­ek and Daly 2004: 64^5). Because there is such a thing as natural death, and a being which relates to its death, a space for signi¢cation is opened up amidst beings as a whole, a certain `openness' that Heidegger calls a `clearing' (Lichtung). It is only later, as we have seen, that Heidegger ¢nds it necessary not only to bring nature within the realm of culture, as a void therein, but also to understand these `things' as the very site of being's manifestation and not merely as being's ground or meaning (which humanized being). Nature in itself, apart from the entire cultural system of oppositions, apart from all appropriation unto man's ends, is `the nature which ``stirs and

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strives'' ', which is indeed writhing with life. The language of stirring and striving, while referring to Goethe's poem `Next Year's Spring', is reminiscent of a Schopenhauerian life of pre-individual tendencies, `life' prior to its evisceration by the symbolic dissection . . . By taking a description of nature from the poet and distinguishing it from the present-at-hand, Heidegger is making clear that what he will come to understand as `earth' is not the `nature' of the natural sciences. We have already addressed this passage earlier in the present work, but let us read it again: is nature in itself really thought to be absolutely concealed, to not even present itself as an absence? Heidegger's description suggests that nature is absolutely concealed and yet exerts some sort of `power' over us. In Heidegger's description, Goethe's nature seems to cast a spell on us, to draw us into it; it is what `assails and enthrals us as landscape' (uns ÏberfÌllt, als Landschaft gefangen nimmt). Heidegger describes this as the `power of nature' (Naturmacht), which expression would lead us naturally to Kant's sublime.19 Was Heidegger deliberately referring us here with the invocation of this phrase? After all, it would be strange to speak of nature as the appearance of the undisclosable and not think of Kant's `appearance of non-appearance'. Perhaps we are speaking of that in nature which does not appear but entices us to nature, the very inhumanity or `realness' of nature which causes us to desire it. Perhaps it is in the form of desire that the sublime relation to this absence takes place: it is manifest only in our being stretched out towards it; for is this stretching not the striving of an ardent desire with which man is torn beyond himself . . . ? We can desire only what is concealed but which nevertheless makes itself known to us, which `enthrals us'. This is all to suggest that the seemingly unphenomenological nature in itself remains not entirely without e¡ect, even here.

Laclau, Heidegger, and Lacan on Signi¢cation: Does Being Need Human Beings? Let us examine more closely the function of absence within the world as the order of signi¢cation. This will allow us to bring our Heideggerian discourse back to Z­iz­ek, bearing with it a question. To do this, we must bring out the similarity that exists between the later Heidegger and the work of Laclau and Mou¡e, and then compare this with Lacan's theory of signi¢cation. We shall thus be able to bring Z­iz­ek's argument for the subject to a ¢ner point and juxtapose it with a discourse very close to it but which nevertheless gives a di¡erent place to the human subject, as Heidegger does. We have already suggested that the di¡erence between Laclau and Z­iz­ek may be analogous to the di¡erence we have been urging between Heidegger and Z­iz­ek. In order to be ¢xed, di¡erential signi¢cation must be limited. It must contain an element which is devoid of meaning and yet inhabits the signi¢cant realm.

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For Laclau and Mou¡e this element is the `empty signi¢er'. If a signi¢er empties itself of meaning it ceases to be di¡erentially de¢ned and thus comes to constitute a moment of self-sameness which internally limits the spreading of signi¢ers. By refusing any speci¢c content of its own it comes to represent the entire ¢eld of signi¢ers and thereby constitutes them as a totality. In this way the empty signi¢er becomes `hegemonic', a `master signi¢er' that ¢xes the sense of everything subordinated to it. Now, Laclau and Mou¡e themselves admit this empty signi¢er to be `analogous' to Lacan's point de capiton (Laclau and Mou¡e 1985: 122). The crucial di¡erence however is that in Lacan, this is the point at which the subject enters the signi¢er. Laclau's empty signi¢er does not seem to be directly related to a subject. This would certainly be¢t Laclau's deconstructive heritage which could not allow meaning to depend on subjective intention. For Lacan, the empty signi¢er is precisely the mark made by the subject in the ¢eld of signi¢ers as a whole. The presence of this empty subjectivity opens a gap in the signi¢er, an element without signi¢cance. If there is a void, it is because the subject has left its mark in the signi¢er by entering it and refusing fully to be captured by it since it is a singularity whose proper name can only be lost upon entering a world of generality.20 Now this is precisely Z­iz­ek's charge against Heidegger, who would to this extent remain the living father of the deconstructive tradition that Laclau inherits, a tradition which deconstructs the subject as a quasi-divine moment of self-proximity or source of meaning richer than that upon which it bestows it: `the truly problematic and central point is that Heidegger refuses to call this [void] subject' (FA: 168, n. 58). Fixed signi¢cation is the e¡ect of a void within beings. The fact that beings as a whole are holed by a void limits the di¡erential expansion of the signi¢er and so ¢xes signi¢cation. Because there is absence in the signi¢er, the signi¢ers' signi¢eds cannot expand inde¢nitely, there is a limit to what each individual can mean. This element of emptiness or sameness orientates the whole without limiting it from outside as would be the case with a meta-physical position. Crucial here is the question of the relation between this void element and the human individual. In Heidegger, this element, the presence of absence, the manifest face of absence, is the thing: this is the moment at which `earth' intrudes into world and vice versa. The plant roots itself into the earth while shooting upwards towards the bright sky. Now, Z­iz­ek claims that Heidegger's ultimate and constant failure is to denominate this thing a `subject'. On one level, this is an easy claim to make since Heidegger renounces the word altogether, the subject being modelled upon the self-grounding of substance or the self-creation of god. Leaving this aside, what is the thing? It is an instantiation of the fourfold. The fourfold comprises the relations that take place between world and earth, man and god. The thing inscribes nature within the signi¢er. Since nature is that absolute absence whose manifest face is displayed by earth, the thing constrains and renders ¢nite any totality of signi¢cation by acting as the presence of this absence.

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But man is not irrelevant to this process of world-formation: the other axis of the fourfold is de¢ned by `man and god'. It is still his being turned towards the void, his awareness of the ¢nitude of entities, his `being-towards-death', that signi¢es (the) nothing and so makes signi¢cation possible. Signi¢cation takes place only because there is an entity which understands or `projects' it: this is the meaning of Heidegger's language of the mutual appropriation (Ereignung) of man and being. Man's ex-sistence stretches actual beings apart to make room for signi¢cation, while the thing as the trace of nature halts the spreading of this signi¢cation and ¢xes it ^ albeit temporarily ^ into a world. This world will remain in force for a certain period, until the thing becomes obsolete and falls into desuetude, a museum piece or object of nostalgia, leaving behind a void that makes possible a new signi¢cation for the whole. Clearly man has some relation to the void's presence in beings, and Z­iz­ek must know this. Perhaps his remarks in this regard are just not speci¢c enough for us to understand how precisely he intends them as a criticism of Heidegger. Let us then attempt to reconstruct the role of the subject in Lacan's theory of signi¢cation, on which Z­iz­ek naturally draws.21

Man and the Void of Signi¢cance What is the precise relation between the human being and the empty signi¢er in Lacan? Man's intention to mean consolidates the totality of signi¢ers into a ¢xed unit of sense. The subject inserts the full stop which delimits a totality of meaning and this ¢xes the signi¢eds of the elements within it. The resultant criticism of deconstruction is that by vanquishing any such thing as a `subject' it relinquishes the means to explain how signi¢cation is ¢xed and ends up with a quasi-psychotic play of signi¢ers, an in¢nite totality without limit and a surfeit of meaning for each signi¢er, irreducible ambiguity. For Lacan, the human being opens up the place of signi¢cation and ¢xes this signi¢cation by entering the signi¢er twice, marking the beginning and end of a (¢nite) totality of signi¢cation. We brie£y examined this process in the previous chapter. In Heidegger on the other hand, man makes the signi¢er possible, but he does not make it actual. We have seen that, insofar as they are natural, all entities are stretched apart, inclined towards the void of their natural death. Perhaps con¢ning the event of manifestation to the human subject, as Lacan does and as the early Heidegger did, is to render the site of being too unique and too uniquely human. The event of revelation takes place in natural entities, or entities which do not elide nature in the process of their production. Man's role in the process of manifestation is to ensure that this elision does not take place, by fostering natural entities and by dwelling in a way that does not use techne to overpower nature and deny culture's dependence upon it. He is called to hold open the spaces in

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beings as a whole where singularity might temporarily ¢nd a lodging. He is to hold open a space for nature. By guarding the sites of the event of manifestation, man may make signi¢cation possible, but the very presence of things of nature is what makes it actual.

Conclusion Our de£ection of Z­iz­ek's criticism risks appearing to be a mere reiteration of the most traditional deconstructive move against the Lacanian tradition. Indeed, Derrida makes just such a suggestion regarding the renewal of a certain French discourse on the subject (Derrida 1989: 16^17). But to mitigate this semblance of an unthinking re£ex, we have read the Z­iz­ekian oeuvre and made allowances for its pre-emption of the Derridean criticism. Beginning from Heidegger as the disavowed father of both Z­iz­ek and Derrida we have shown Z­iz­ek systematically to suppress the challenge which Heidegger's thought presents. Perhaps the reason why Heidegger must lurk menacingly in the background of Z­iz­ek's thought is because the latter is premised upon its oppositional de¢nition with respect to those (deconstructionists) who supposedly elide the problematic of the `subject'. We have shown that this premise is licensed by a misreading of Heidegger's early work and that this allows Z­iz­ek to ignore the alternative way in which his own problematic is worked out in the later Heidegger, in a way that leads beyond the subject. This way splits the responsibility for the event between man and the thing, an event which amounts to a revolutionary epochal change in the manifestation of beings as a whole, a historical change of world. Heidegger's early work should not be read as a deconstructionist elision of the worldless `subject'; Heidegger should be read beyond deconstruction. We have thus brought ourselves into a position from which we can see more precisely the relation between man and the thing in the event of being. The arising of man makes manifestation possible, but, as we are witnessing today in its annihilation, the thing is needed if manifestation is to remain actual. Man, now that he has arisen, must watch over these sites of manifestation, these things, and this means that he must above all defend nature. Thus we have ¢nally established that the event of manifestation does not take place in man's understanding. This understanding, or rather man in his very being, is to respond to an event that takes place elsewhere. He is the receiver rather than the initiator of this event. Above all, today, the possibilities of taming that which would destroy the thing are limited for the individual. The destructive apparatus of technology is so powerful and so tied up with capitalist interests to which the state is in thrall that the protection of nature is not just an ethical matter but a political one. We have already seen in this chapter that Heidegger believed that the very relation between man and technology, nomos and physis, was precisely broached by the National Socialist Party in 1933. This was its uniqueness, and the reason

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Heidegger tolerated for a time its `excesses'. We do not believe that he ever entirely gave up on politics, but in the following chapter we shall insist that he does not. The thing must be that which mobilizes a political movement, since the thing alone is the site at which an event of manifestation can occur which would threaten the current world-order. We witness it today, in the West, and Europe in particular in the popular force gathering behind the `environmental movement' ^ it is our only sign of hope. We must now ensure that this movement does not misread the event to which it is answering. Thus we shall demonstrate what goes awry when this event, the natural cataclysm, is construed solely or primarily in human terms, when the `environmental' threat is understood as a threat to man. What is crucial is that politics should seek not human emancipation, but the emancipation of nature from man's destructive predations. The event of nature's destruction must be endowed with the greatest possible capacity for revelation. But if we are speaking of human emancipation, we are speaking of Marx . . .

Chapter 5

Heidegger and Marxism: `A Productive Dialogue'

We have seen in the previous chapter that the empty place within beings as a whole, which supports the appearance of this whole, is not to be occupied by man. Man is crucial but marginal to this place. The event of manifestation is not the light that dawns in his understanding of being, that aspect of man which is receptive to the phenomenon that reaches out and grabs us; the event of being originates elsewhere and approaches us from that point. The event happens within nature, and today its scintillation is at its most dazzling. Our captivation by nature and its impending apocalypse mirrors the wonderment of the Greek beginning, but today our response is the mood of horror.1 The Greeks stood at the beginning of culture and hence at the very ¢rst dawning of nature: today, we stand on the brink of its end. The event of being, manifestation, begins from nature. We, as men, have merely to be there (Da-sein) to receive it, and not mu¥e its quiet insistence with the thunder of our machination. Man has been enslaved by his own creation and reduced to a mere cog in a process that forces all entities to partake of a single gigantic grid of energy production and consumption; and his emancipation, when it comes to being, is not the most fundamental. If we are speaking of human emancipation, our discourse opens immediately onto Marxism. Marx was utterly clear that it was the proletarian class which represented the interests of the whole of the human race, and one may presume the whole of the earth, if this question ever appealed to him. The proletariat would be that class which was more than a `class' and stood rather for the universal, `man'. It was towards the liberation of this human being qua human being that the whole of Marx's work seems to us to tend. Thus we must ask whether, in Marxism, there is not a repetition of the humanism we have tentatively proposed to exist in Z­iz­ek and the psychoanalytic tradition to which we have gradually drawn Heidegger close, in order, so to speak, to draw him out of `himself ', away from deconstruction, and into the service of what is most urgent: the protection of nature. It is important to approach Marxism ^ albeit in a way which we admit to be incomplete and thus programmatic ^ since it will aid us in demonstrating what must be achieved on a political level in order to make possible the defence of nature against exploitation and destruction, which we must show to be more important even than the defence of the exploited human being. The self-interest of this

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narcissistic and hubristic race must be placed in abeyance in the face of a greater extinction. Any political stance, such as Marxism, which poses human prospering as its primary aim is inadequate to the current situation, which is to say incapable of responding to the event of manifestation as it appears today. An adequate politics would be an `ontological' politics or a `politics of truth'. Neither we nor Heidegger presuppose that such a politics is possible. In the previous chapter we have implicitly negated Z­iz­ekian politics. Now we must determine whether or not it is possible to present a positive alternative, and thus demonstrate that our negation was ^ to speak with Hegel ^ a determinate one. At the same time, the most powerful critical approach to the `environmental' problem tends to issue from a Marxist perspective, with the self-escalating nature of capital, spurring on an ever greater production, blamed for the speed with which the disaster has approached us. Marxism is once again reasserting itself in continental (which is to say, critical and non-parochial) thought as the `unsurpassable horizon of our time' (Sartre), yet more so the more completely capitalism establishes its dominion, and yet also at a moment in which the ¢rst cracks are beginning to show as ¢ssures in the earth's crust and atmosphere, as it creaks and gives way under the strain of the gargantuan machinery of production. Thus it becomes all the more important that Marxism is not taken for granted in the struggle against a natural-technical cataclysm. If it is the most likely source of a fundamental solution to the problem, then it is important that its approach be completely adequate to the problem at hand. If there is to be a `dialogue' ^ this is Heidegger's word ^ between Heidegger and Marxism, does this not imply that while it may be possible to situate certain aspects of Marx's thought within metaphysics, at the same time he must elude this metaphysical determination and provide a di¡erent kind of impetus for Heideggerian thought? But then again, does Heidegger not speak in Contributions to Philosophy of the relation between metaphysics and what ^ if anything ^ comes after it as a `dialogue', even a `conversation'? And yet, if this were the case, would the dialogue with Marx be a `productive' one? And why would Heidegger single out Marx in particular, as he unquestionably does? Let us force Heidegger to have meant the ¢rst kind of conversation. In this chapter, we shall attempt to maintain a `dialogue' between Heidegger and Marxism and use Marx to goad Heidegger into venturing out of his ethical abode into the arena of politics ^ assuming this word can mean more than the liberal parliamentary democracy, the `democratic consensus' (Laclau), which today mocks the very notion of `politics'. We are ensuring that Heidegger does indeed remember the city, the polis, and that his ideal is not a return to the rustic but a reassertion of the dichotomy of town and country. And at the same time, as Heidegger is drawn into this dialogue, he will put certain questions to Marx regarding his stress on the human as the primary subject of emancipation through the (self-)destruction of the capitalist economic formation.

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We shall begin by laying out Heidegger's criticisms of Marx, those moments at which he identi¢es him, despite his insight, as having fallen victim to metaphysics. Then, guided by our reading of Marx's early work and following the trail already blazed by Althusser and Henry, we shall allow Marx a retort, and show just how far he is truly invulnerable to these criticisms. Then we shall return the gauntlet to Heidegger, in closing. Thus we hope to make visible the topics upon which the future `dialogue' which Heidegger foresees between his thought and Marxism would take place. Let us therefore expose Heidegger's criticisms and the extent to which Marx eludes the metaphysics of subjectivity to which Heidegger at least in part consigns him, a metaphysics which always presupposes a particular kind of human essence. The dialogue will culminate with Heidegger's return to the question of humanism that is still implicit in Marx's notion of communism. We shall assert, particularly in light of our ruminations in the previous chapter with regard to Z­iz­ek, that the space in the whole which represents the whole, where the whole is illuminated to itself, shown up in its truth, is found not in man but in nature, of which we are merely the guardians. This in turn will lead us to ask whether a certain modi¢cation of Marx's communism is required in order to answer more e¡ectively to the most pressing problem of today, which this book has been circling. It is not the emancipation of man which is most fundamental, it is the emancipation of nature.

Heidegger and Marxian Metaphysics One of Heidegger's implicit criticisms of Marx is that he thinks being in terms of value. This would place him within a wider metaphysical history that includes Nietzsche and Heidegger's neo-Kantian predecessors (cf. NIV: 58^68/ 96^109; 176^7/229^31). Being is being valid and being valuable, having either a certain qualitative worth or a certain quantitative value. Thus to think in terms of use-value and exchange-value pins Marx to metaphysics as that discourse which does not think the process that lies behind such determinations of being, their historical relativity and presuppositions, but merely makes these determinations. Above all, it thereby considers the entity as an object of human understanding: through the characterisation of something as `a value' [`Wert'] what is so valued is robbed of its worth [WÏrde]. That is to say, by the assessment of something as a value what is valued is admitted only as an object for human estimation. But what a thing is in its being is not exhausted by its being an object, particularly when objectivity takes the form of value. Every valuing, even where it values positively, is a subjectivising. It does not let beings: be. (LH: 265/179) But Marx does not presuppose a determination of beings as `value'. He provides a history of it. As Michel Henry in particular has pointed out, Marx's work in

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Capital and even earlier is a description of the genesis of the very notion of `economy' and `value', which emerge from a source ^ `life' ^ which is not inherently valuable (Henry 1998: 126). `Human labour-power in its £uid state, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value' (CI: 142). It only becomes this when it is externalized in the objects which it produces, when these objects become primarily commodities to be bought and sold. In particular, given its historical urgency, Marx investigates the process of valorization which takes place in contemporary Western societies under the sway of capitalism: the frenzied production of surplus-value (Mehrwert): it is only a historically speci¢c epoch of development which presents the labour expended in the production of a useful article as an `objective' property of that article, i.e. as its value. It is only then that the product of labour becomes transformed into a commodity. (CI: 153^4) But Heidegger has another more deadly snare with which to entrap Marx within metaphysics. He accuses him of accepting the historically determined notion of man's essence as labour, a determination ¢rst decided upon by Hegel: `praxis is determined by what? By a certain theory, which casts the concept of production as the production of the human by itself. Marx therefore has a theoretical representation of the human [. . .] which includes as its foundation the Hegelian philosophy' (FS: 52/91). `The modern metaphysical essence of labour is anticipated in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit ' (LH: 259/171). But so little is this the case that it could even be argued that Marx provides a story of the way in which human beings become subjects which relate to themselves in such a way that their own activity comes to appear to them as their belonging. Thus a certain element of their own capacities comes to be distinguished from them, and therefore alienable: their activity becomes a commodity to be sold, labour-power. Life is originally activity, it does not become labour until other humans and the possibility of exchange arrive on the scene. This story of the genesis of subjectivity, particularly in the in£ection which it receives in the modern, post-Cartesian age, is precisely what Heidegger himself was concerned with. And like Heidegger, Marx found it necessary to examine the e¡ects which the technology of the industrial revolution had on man's relation to himself and to otherness, being, which Heidegger felt to be threatened by the machination of contemporary science and industrial technology. In opposition to Heidegger's complaint that Marx presupposes labour as the essence of man, we shall show that Marx in fact depicts the genesis of this understanding, and he does so by way of an understanding of the genesis of propriety itself. This is a story about the emergence of human beings from nature by way of the installation of a gap or mediation between life and itself in a certain moment of scarcity within life. The question of the nature of action, of praxis (and so of poiesis and techne), is at the heart of Heidegger's `Letter on Humanism', which contains some of his most intriguing comments on Marx. In fact, the Letter is circumscribed by this

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question, at its beginning and at its end, the two moments marking the extremities and limits within which the Letter unfolds. Heidegger ends with two comparisons of thinking, one with nature, and one with culture, indeed perhaps the very earliest form of culture, the breaking of the earth with the plough: Thinking gathers language into simple saying. In this way language is the language of being, as clouds are the clouds of the sky. With its saying, thinking lays inconspicuous furrows in language. They are still more inconspicuous than the furrows that the farmer, slow of step, draws through the ¢eld. (LH: 276/194) Contrast this with the very beginning of the Letter: We are still far from pondering the essence of action decisively enough. We view action only as causing an e¡ect. The actuality of e¡ect is valued according to its utility. But the essence of action is accomplishment. To accomplish means to unfold something into the fullness of its essence, to lead it forth into this fullness ^ producere. Therefore only what already is can really be accomplished. But what `is' above all is being. Thinking accomplishes the relation of being to the essence of the human being. (LH: 239/145) This is to say that the most fundamental form of action which human beings are capable of is one which leads being to appear in and as beings. This means to allow the historically determined nature of appearance to appear, and to refuse to allow singular beings to be destroyed. Does Marx think praxis in this way? Perhaps. His notion of a revolutionary event and the critique of ideology as the revelation of the historically and particularly determined nature of that which presents itself as timeless and universal are akin to a Heideggerian practice, which Heidegger aligns with poiesis as the form of praxis which is revelatory (QCT: 10/10^11). In Capital, however, Marx does seem to remain within a traditional metaphysical determination of labour: he invokes the Aristotelian notions of potentiality and actuality with regard to the transition from labour-power to labour itself, the capacity to labour in act:2 `By working, the latter [the labourer] becomes in actuality what previously he only was potentially, namely labourpower in action, a worker' (CI: 283). Marx also refers to the eidos that guides techne, an understanding of the relation between theory and practice which Heidegger ¢nds characteristic of the traditionally Greek understanding of action: the model `already existed ideally' in the mind of the human architect before the building was constructed (CI: 284). But, once again, we shall soon show contra Heidegger that Marx does consider the nature and the genesis of this determination of activity. It is by no means a presupposition.

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Nevertheless, it is already becoming clear that the dialogue between Heidegger and Marxism will come to focus on the questions of man and action. Labour is the motor of production and a `productive dialogue' may also be a dialogue about `production'. Is the most fundamental form of activity one which relates to being, to appearance in its historically speci¢c form? Heidegger thinks that to understand beings as products is to view them in a way which began with Plato and thenceforth dominated all metaphysical understandings of beings. But this is truly what beings have become today: consumable products, and Heidegger recognizes this. The question is whether one realizes the depth of the history that produces this determination and thus whether one responds to this event in the most basic and e¡ective way. We must ask whether Marx's response is of this kind, and whether this will indeed be the topic of a `productive dialogue' between Heidegger and Marxism. Does Marx reach the very deepest origin of this understanding of being and thereby perform a deconstruction on the same level as Heidegger's `Destruktion'? Heidegger's question with regard to Marx's labour is not entirely misplaced: we shall ask whether it does in fact embody a certain indi¡erence to nature and hence an appropriation, which takes beings, even in a communist society, as the `material' for a technical appropriation. Thus we shall ultimately arrive at the question of whether it was always man's and never nature's distress which told on Marx. This would mean that even if a Marxist revolutionary praxis produced or responded to an event of manifestation in a way that would rescue nature from the worst excesses of capitalism, nature itself would still be treated as the raw material for human labour. Nature would never be revealed in any way other than as resource (Bestand ). Thus the abolition of class would still leave in place a productive and appropriative attitude to nature, and the real problem would remain unsolved. This relates to the questions we addressed in the previous chapter as to whether it is man or the thing which occupies the site of being. For Marx, it seems as if this empty place is occupied by the proletarian subject, who represents every being and so promises a certain universality if ever it got the better of the class struggle: its victory promises the abolition of class and exploitation. If we have identi¢ed this as a humanism in Z­iz­ek, would this then license us in taking nature and its distress as the primary source of the ethico-political call, the one most urgent, not just because without it every other struggle is rendered meaningless, but because it is the one most likely to engender an action that resists the status quo, since it is most likely to reveal at the very deepest level what is wrong with this status? This would allow us to believe that despite all we have said to de£ect Heidegger's criticisms, in the end Marx would remain a humanist. His notion of `communism' would be the end of the dispossession of man, but nature would remain appropriated, and to the extent that a Marxist revolution did not challenge the contemporary revelation of being as energy resource, a part of it would remain embedded in a wider metaphysical history.

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Marx's Tale Marx does not presuppose the subject of modernity, the self-sustaining support for beings as a whole, which for Heidegger begins to be thematized in philosophical discourse with Descartes. He does not presuppose a subject that would be characterized by labour and thus does not remain under the sway of the metaphysics of labour. Like Henry, we are here drawing upon a `philosophical' Marx and we shall largely base our remarks on the posthumous works published in the 1930s, including the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, The German Ideology and The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, all written around 1842^6 (cf. Henry 1998: 118).3 It is not clear whether Heidegger himself knew these texts. If he did, then we might simply be explicating the positive aspect of Heidegger's assessment, which was that Marx provides us with a history of the very arising of such a thing as subjectivity, as well as the origin of what is consequent upon it, the emergence of labour. This would be man's homelessness and alienation which Heidegger identi¢es as the unique and timely insight of Marx.4 Labour will be a particular, historically determined modi¢cation of man's `activity', which may be understood to follow from a certain originary separation of man from himself and from his immediate animal relationship with the environment. The task for Marx will therefore be to trace the emergence of this dehiscence with the origination of man and its subsequent, ruinous alienation. This alienation begins with the end of self-su¤ciency and the necessity for the division of labour among a plurality of workers who are not our `own' ^ which is to say, our kin. This necessitates exchange, between labourers, and eventually between labourers and non-labourers (capitalists). This alienation of one's products and the need to sell merely in order to exist is the beginning of the most severe and ever increasing self-alienation which Marx ¢nds to characterize the capitalist economic formation. He then outlines a notion of `communism' in which man would exercise his activity ^ which means his `life', `for what is life except activity?' (EcPh: 81) ^ without having to exchange his product and alienate himself merely in order to stay alive. Marx will appear to understand this as the reconciliation of man with himself and with nature, which we shall presume to mean his nature as a species which is in truth to be in a certain regard non-natural or technical. But Marx certainly understands technical man and natural nature to share a single plane, which might itself be called `nature', a certain absolute immanence. It seems ultimately that in man's natural activity there is a doubling, because man cannot simply rely on an immediate relation with his environment to provide him with the means of his subsistence. He must himself produce the means of his subsistence, he must build a bridge between himself and nature, from which he has been dissevered. This amounts to the supplement of techne ¢rst embodied in the use of tools to adapt an inhospitable environment to man's needs; or rather, as Marx sees it, in the production of the very tools with which to adapt

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nature. Thus the ¢rst technicization, the ¢rst production, produces the means of production. This is what we mean by `doubling'. This doubling ^ producing (means) in order to produce (subsistence) ^ is at the same time for Marx the origin of consciousness, consciousness as this separation of life from itself and its doubling back in order to re£ect on itself. A process, as Rousseau and Nietzsche have identi¢ed, stirred by a certain de¢ciency in life itself. Life does not re£ect on itself when it has no need, but only when a cunning detour is required in order for (weakened) life to preserve itself.

Nature What lifts man out of nature, instituting a gap between the two? Since man is born of nature, this is to say: what introduces a delay between nature and itself ? It is clear that Marx believes in this separation and that he thinks it in terms of a supplement which man requires. This supplement does not immediately take the form of labour (Arbeit), but at least takes the form of an `activity' which is susceptible of being transformed into labour. Activity is distinguished from labour by not necessarily being distinguished from the entity itself. An animal has a life-activity and is one with this activity, its very life is its activity: `The animal is immediately one with its vital activity. It is not distinct from it. They are identical' (EcPh: 82). The animal does not labour. But with man, for reasons we are about to expound, this activity suddenly attains the possibility of being alienated, of being separated from oneself as one's `property'. And when it is so separated it becomes one's `labour', a commodity to be sold: `all human activity has hitherto been labour, i.e. industry, self-alienated activity' (EcPh: 93). At the same time, `labour' implies arduousness and a certain transitivity, which implies that this labour is directed outwards, at the world, as a means to transform it. When and if an animal transforms its environment, these transformations remain in some way the animal's `own' in a way that man's do not: the products of an animal's activity can never be exchanged between animals: they always relate to its own survival needs and those of its kin.5 It never labours uselessly, even though it plays. As Heidegger states at the very beginning of the `Letter on Humanism', activity is generally understood as production (LH: 239/145). This indeed appears to be how Marx understands it. Marx takes the originally human activity to be a toiling on nature which adapts it to man's needs. `All production is appropriation of nature' (ICPE: 5). It makes nature into a use-value. Nature is thus turned into man's `inorganic body' (EcPh: 83). This refers to the fashioning of instruments of production from nature, which naturality keeps us tied to nature and to natural bonds, unlike the cultural instruments, particularly following the industrial revolution, which will eventually uproot man from nature altogether (GI: 71^2). `The use and construction of instruments of labour [. . .] is characteristic of the speci¢cally human labour process' (CI: 286).

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All those things which labour merely separates from immediate connection with their environment are objects of labour spontaneously provided by nature, such as ¢sh caught and separated from their natural element, namely water, timber felled in virgin forests. (CI: 284) Marx is quite clear that `[w]e presuppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic' (CI: 283^4). Marx does refer to bees and spiders, as well as beavers and ants (CI: 284, cf. EcPh: 82) but suggests that what distinguishes their activity from man's is that they do not have an idea in their mind when they carry out this purely `instinctual' life-activity. The delay in which thinking occurs has not yet opened up for them. But why does nature need work in order to yield up the objects of man's needs? It can only be because the immediate relation which the animal and plant enjoy with nature is lacking in man, or is at least faulty. There is a gap between life and life itself which necessitates the building of bridges. Nature must be tempted out of itself by man's solicitation, his pro-ducere, which amounts to nature's being led forth from out of itself, where it remains shy of man's instincts. This shyness or reticence, this gap between man and his environment, necessitates work (techne) on the part of man, to force nature to yield up what life needs in this instance in order to carry on living. Marx discusses this precisely in terms of `life': life, for man, is the means of life (EcPh: 82), which is to say that there is a doubling, a re£ection within life in the case of man. In order to maintain and reproduce itself, life must produce a supplementary technical means with which to sustain itself as life (rather than death): man's activity `is therefore not the satisfaction of a need but only a means to satisfy needs outside itself ' (EcPh: 80). This `means' is the essential `mediation' which separates man from himself as an instance of life, and di¡erentiates him from the animal. The animal is at one with its life-activity (EcPh: 82), but in man this activity becomes an object for itself, `an object of his will and consciousness' (EcPh: 82). In other words, a subject is formed in the sense of a loop of re£exive self-hood, a moment of self-relation, which implies an original alienation from oneself. How could one relate to oneself if one were not already distinguished from oneself ? Since life is activity for Marx, this means that one becomes separated from one's immediate animal unity with one's activity and that this activity becomes one's belonging, rather than simply being identical with oneself. Marx speaks of the intervention of the act of production as taking its place between life and itself, which we take to mean that it renders life dependent on means other than nature, other than life: the technical crutch. `[P]roductive life is species-life. It is life producing life [. . .]. Life itself appears merely as a means to life' (EcPh: 82), but `when alienated labour tears from man the object of his production, it also tears from him his species-life [. . .] his inorganic body, nature, is torn from him' (EcPh: 82^3). This separation, which introduces a mediation between life and itself, opens up the possibility for excess, and in particular the excessive production which

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characterizes man alone: `man produces free from physical need and only truly produces when he is thus free' (EcPh: 82). He produces even when he has no need of it. In other words, desire comes to govern man's production. `The ¢rst way an object of utility attains the possibility of becoming an exchange-value is to exist as a non-use value, super£uous to the immediate needs of the owner' (CI: 189). Thus while an animal is inherently measured in what it consumes, because a technical device separates man from himself and from his needs, it opens up the very space of desire, which is always an excess over natural instinctual needs.6 Marx distinguishes man from animals by the fact that the former do not ¢nd the object of their needs in their environment, unlike the non-technical, or non-alienated, animals in immediate harmony with their world. Rather, they produce the very means with which to satisfy their needs. Nature does not immediately provide, so man is compelled to produce means with which to force it to yield up provisions. Men `produce their means of subsistence' (GI: 37), and they would do this only if they had to. They have a physical need for this: it is `a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation' (GI: 37, my italics). This is the very origin of man. Indeed, Marx identi¢es this mediation as the `¢rst historical act' (GI: 48). In a moment of delay and doubling, history as the inheritance of tradition opens up: certain means are instituted which can then be `passed on' to the next generation, thus producing an endurance which marks time out as history. `History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which uses the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations' (GI: 58). Marx expresses man's separation from and relation to himself as the fact that in producing the means of his subsistence, rather than simply living as an animal does, production needs to intervene in the very maintenance of man's life. `By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life' (GI: 37). From nature they need to draw out the means with which to survive, to carry on living. Thus their very mode of life is determined by what and how they produce: `What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce' (GI: 37). Their character as a species is not given naturally in advance of the way they unfold their life and their place in a history. It is decided upon by the manner in which they choose and are forced to produce, to prevail upon nature to yield up the means with which to ensure their survival. `Hence what individuals are depends on the material conditions of their production' (GI: 37). It is because of this gap and the institution of this doubling in life that the nature which man has before him is always historical:7 it is always a nature that must be worked upon and transformed to constitute the means of man's subsistence (GI: 45^6). Either that or it is nature which has already been worked upon, cultivated or left fallow. Marx de¢nes history as the inheritance of already-existing means with which to work upon nature: `The ¢rst historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life' (GI: 47):

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a certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of cooperation is itself a `productive force'. Further, that the aggregate of productive forces accessible to man determines the condition of society, hence, the `history of humanity' must always be studied and treated in relation to the history of industry and exchange. (GI: 49) This means that because all future generations will be as de¢cient with respect to nature as those that came before, and because individual lives are de¢ned by these means, these future generations must inherit former means, former ways of working upon nature. Therefore, these productive alterations of nature form the basis of history as this inheritance. Nature must have been inscribed with a mark in order for it to be inherited, since only then is inheritance as such marked with the notch that only human hands can inscribe ^ the notch necessary to indicate repetition, which alone constitutes `tradition', that which is repeatedly handed down. This is why Marx says that the history of humanity must be studied in relation to the history of industry and exchange, because this history is the history of the inheritance and alteration of the various means of production which man produces by making an instrument (and raw material) of nature. This would be the meaning of a real or materialistic history, one which sees the events of history as changes in the means of production rather than in the alternation of ideas: `the philosophy of history is nothing but the history of philosophy' (PP: 202, cf. PP: 199, GI: 41^51, GI: 62^7). This history is the only adequate history because the technical gap with respect to himself means that what man is is de¢ned by the means of production (which includes the production of himself, in the sense of his self-maintenance). It is de¢ned by the particular means he inherits from the way men formerly set upon nature. This real history would record `the historical movement by which the successive generations transformed the results acquired by the generations that preceded them' (PP: 209). As well as de¢ning the creation of the means of production as the ¢rst historical act, Marx states that this act is also the creation of new needs, which takes place with the satisfaction of earlier ones (GI: 47). Perhaps this means that a new manner in which to make nature yield up the means of subsistence ^ and thus satisfy di¡erent needs ^ constitutes a real historical event. Thus a historical act would be a moment at which the means with which man sets upon nature to supply the means of his subsistence changes. Thus the industrial revolution would be one of the greatest events of human history, perhaps second only to the very institution of man as a technical being. Production leaves a mark on nature. In working on things, man externalizes himself, he leaves a trace of himself on objects outside of himself: they are no longer what they are but have been moulded to human ends. But this produces a separation within man, between himself and his works. Means taken from

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nature must be fashioned into tools, the means of production ^ means with which to produce: raw materials and instruments for producing things. Thus, by making nature into an extension of the organs of one's own body, one split between oneself as this body over here and the prosthesis one ¢nds it necessary to fashion from nature. Life becomes separated from itself. In quasi-Hegelian fashion, for Marx one rea¤rms the unity of these two separated halves, torn asunder, and reassures oneself that they are indeed both parts of one's self, by consuming the products of prosthetic labour: `The individual produces a certain article and turns again into himself by consuming it' (ICPE: 10). This is the meaning of the self-proximity which takes place in `enjoyment', the enjoyment in which the worker returns to himself from his alienation, when he rests from the work which externalizes him, by marking him in something external to his own body. Enjoyment reasserts this product as himself or his own. Thus `self-belonging' is attained by the twofold of production and consumption. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx suggests that this kind of indirect production of enjoyment is inherently alienating to the producer, since it produces only the means of satisfying needs rather than the object of need itself. If it did produce the latter, the individual's act of production would immediately rebound on the individual himself, he would be self-su¤cient or immersed in immediate enjoyment. Since it does not, labour is an activity in which we feel unfree, and it is only when directly satisfying our animal needs and refuelling the production machine when we are not working that we feel free (EcPh: 80^1). Thus man retains some semblance of animal self-proximity by means of technical production. He has to go to all this work just to achieve a poor replica of what the animal achieves naturally. Yet it is precisely as a result of this self-externalization that man is laid open to a prolonging and exacerbation of this alienation. Once he stops being able to produce everything he needs, the circle of self-reappropriation will come to depend on others. As Marx puts it, the other intercedes between production and consumption: `the relation, of the producer to his product [. . .] is an outward one and the return of the product to the individual depends on his relations to other individuals [. . .]. Between the producer and the product distribution steps in' (ICPE: 10). Thus a network of distribution and exchange intercedes between the individual producer and his individual consumption, leading ultimately to the colossal structure in which today we ¢nd ourselves entangled. Anti-capitalist ethics generally involves ¢nding a way to disentangle ourselves from this network. It is precisely this notion of detachment which we are interrogating in Heidegger under the guise of `Gelassenheit'. After all, it is not entirely clear that man has truly uprooted himself from nature at this point. He is still an animal, albeit a de¢cient one. This I believe is how Marx understands it. Society has not yet been introduced: this occurs only with the emergence of exchange and thus the plurality of exchangers. It is possible that technical man produces enough to satisfy his needs without recourse to exchange. As long as he produces just enough and only as much as

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he needs, despite his capacity to produce (and therefore consume) excessively, in this perhaps mythical moment he will remain an animal, a member of his `species', since he does not depend for the satisfaction of his (animal) needs on a society in which exchange takes place. How does Marx explain the fact that production and alienation become excessive and man eventually uproots himself from this original proximity to nature to become fully human, a social being, qualitatively distinct from the animal? So far we have been treating of man as successfully supplementing his natural de¢ciencies and thus returning to a state as functional as that of the animal. We shall later wonder if Marx's notion of communism is precisely a return to this original state of man, which is not an animal unity with nature which he never in truth possessed, but a return to this time before production outran need and thus a return to the `natural' state of man as an animal species. If so, the gap between man and himself, bridged by the technical supplement, would not be closed, but as the return of man's `individuality' (a trope Marx employs a number of times) it would be the assurance that no others would intercede in the circle with which life rejoins itself. Thus he would not be at the mercy of others ^ and exploitative others ^ when it came to satisfying his natural needs. This moment is crucial for our thesis, it is the moment at which man's natural techne becomes unnatural. It is crucial because Marx wishes to understand communism as a reconciliation of man with nature which yet preserves, as it must, man's distinction from nature.

Man The moment of production is not yet the beginning of human society: this will begin with the necessity for exchanging goods with others in order to meet one's needs. As yet, although one has transformed a piece of nature into a usevalue, something useful for man which satis¢es one of his needs, it is not yet necessary that one produce either too much or too little, but just enough to maintain one's life and that of one's o¡spring and dependents (one's natural biological family, blood relations). It is when this further imbalance occurs that will leave the natural world altogether and enter the `heavenly' and the `ideal', the supernatural realm of society, understood as a conglomerate of human beings based on need. We are still in a world that has no need for exchange in order to survive. There is always use-value, but this has not yet accrued the sublimity of exchangevalue. There is only instinct and need, desire has not yet been stirred by the possibility of exchanging one's products for the exotic goods on the other side of the river. Thus man still approximates the animal which is driven by survival needs rather than (destructive) desires. When I can no longer produce all that is necessary to satisfy my needs, when my life risks not being able to perpetuate itself, the need to exchange goods with

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another producer arises. Structural anthropology after Mauss has empirically identi¢ed exchange as the very origin of human society, albeit in the form of the exchange of women between blood groups by means of marriage.8 But for what reason would exchange take place if not the need to receive something in return? For Marx, exchange is made possible by the original dehiscence between man and nature. Because man is not directly tied to nature it can be taken from him (EcPh: 82^3). In other words, it is only because man has a technical, prosthetic relation to nature by way of production that exchange becomes possible. For exchange to occur, a part of ourselves, our belonging, must have become distinct from us and yet remain a part of ourselves: In order that its possessor may sell it [labour-power] as a commodity, he must have it at his disposal, he must be the free proprietor of his own labourcapacity, hence of his person [. . .]. In this way he manages both to externalise [veraÏssern] his labour-power and to avoid renouncing his rights of ownership over it. (CI: 271) This will mean that we have something, but something which can become the property of others. This is why alienated labour is the origin of private property: `Private property is thus the product, result, and necessary consequence of externalised labour' (EcPh: 84). Indeed, Marx tells us that labour logically implies the division between the act of labour and its products, which is to say, property. In other words, the very fact that man labours entails a splitting of himself from himself, between himself and his belongings. Thus exchange is made possible by the original splitting of life from itself, the gap which opens between man and nature, necessitating the mark inscribed by production, the intercession of a prosthetic `means' in order to survive. Thus one can see in what way, according to Henry (Henry 1998: 122^3), the original philosophical theses of Marx on the nature of man make possible and necessary the work on economics, necessitated by the existence and self-escalation of exchange.9 Life, for Marx, is activity (EcPh: 81). But when this activity becomes labour, it is `activity directed against himself ' (EcPh: 81, my italics). Life, by being separated from and then rejoining itself, becomes man's `property'. This is why the abolition of property will amount to man's return to himself, `the positive abolition of private property and thus of human self-alienation and therefore the real reappropriation of the human essence by and for man' (EcPh: 89). In other words, we are not immediately one with our activity, it becomes our object. Marx explicitly compares this alienation of life with the way private property alienates things (GI: 247). They are no longer immediately themselves, but objects on a market, possessed of an exchange-value. Things are in themselves external to man, and therefore alienable. In order that this alienation [VerÌusserung] may be reciprocal, it is only necessary for men to agree tacitly to treat each other as the private owners of those

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alienable things, and, precisely for that reason, as persons who are independent of each other. (CI: 182) The dependence on others for the satisfaction of one's needs is what Marx calls `the division of labour'. As if to license our description of exchange as a social exacerbation of a natural state, he traces the division of labour, which is the very origin of society, back to the natural division of labour between male and female, a division of labour based on `natural predisposition' (GI: 50, my italics, cf. EcPh: 88). The division of labour also leads to a con£ict of individual interests, which then necessitates the introduction of the State (GI: 53), which represents the (illusory) notion of general interest. The State mediates and moderates this competition by embodying a truce in the war of all against all which characterizes the civil society which is distinct from the political community or State (cf. JQ: 102, 104). Thus human society is ¢nally distinguished from the animal world, and cuts itself o¡ from its roots. It is when man comes to produce products for others in order to exchange them that production de¢nitively becomes labour. This we may infer from Marx's statement that labour has been the condition of `all society up to then' (GI: 88, my italics). In other words, before the necessity for exchange which founds society, activity is not labour. Labour implies the commodi¢cation of the products of activity, which means that they are produced primarily in order to be exchanged or sold. Thus it is at this moment, the moment of the failure of self-su¤ciency, when the gap of need between oneself and one's environment becomes too wide to be satis¢ed by one's own technical activity, that economics enters human life. This ¢nally causes life to become social and entirely uproots it from nature in which it was already only insecurely moored.

Communism: the Proletariat We must now examine Marx's understanding of how this state of alienation, this almost inde¢nite prolongation of man's natural dehiscence from himself, can be overcome. This would mean that the exasperation of the wound was returned to a state in which nature is not entirely lost sight of and in which the width of the gap in which techne operates is regulated, if not altogether closed. Precisely by reducing labour to abstract labour-power, construing its only worth as its homogeneity, in its equivalence for exchange, capitalism produces the conditions for its own downfall. For hereby the labour into which the worker is forced de¢nes him, and de¢nes all workers as the same: `as soon as the division of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape' (GI: 53). Thus it creates a homogenized human being who precisely by means of this homogenization ¢nds himself akin to every one of a growing mass of

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workers, similarly homogenized, reduced to their entirely abstract labourpower. Labour-power is distinguished from labour by this homogeneity: it is the simple capacity to labour without qualitative di¡erentiation into various kinds of labour. Thus, a revolution is possible only when the greatest mass of mankind has become propertyless, since this introduces a su¤ciently wide discrepancy between the workers who are deprived and those who have grown wealthy through the exploitation of their labour (cf. GI: 54). This discrepancy is prised open only by means of a great increase in productive power, which originates in man and the industrial machine, the machine now competing with man because he himself has been reduced to a mere quantum of energy to be actualized in work: a machinic cog or battery. Thus the conditions for revolution originate in material history and are necessitated by it. This is why Marx is little more than a historian, and a philosopher of the origins of history, since he believes in the historically necessary self-overcoming of the capitalist mode of production for precisely the reasons we are outlining here. Once national barriers have been opened, allowing trans-national trade and the migration of labour, workers become aware of those who share their predicament internationally, and a network of communication becomes possible between them. When this is combined with a su¤ciently large inequality between these workers and the richest of the capitalist class, one has all the preconditions for a revolution, preconditions which capitalism itself generates. Hitherto all revolutions, all changes in the ruling political power, have merely been a usurpation of one particular set of interests by another. Thus political power always remained a mere organ to serve the particular interests of those who rule, of the particular ruling class (GI: 52^3). Precisely because of the extreme state of homogeneity or universality which the proletariat have been reduced to, their revolution will not be structurally homologous with any previous revolution and merely insert another particular interest in place of the bourgeois interest which currently predominates. Rather, because the proletarians have become so homogeneous they are in a position to become aware of the very species `man'. And since this class, this species has through alienation been deprived of any interests of its own, beyond animal survival,10 its interests coincide with those of mankind as a whole. And this means that if it assumes power it will spell the end of power and the very distinction of classes, since it cannot be in humankind's interest to have a class which is dominated and exploited. Thus the proletariat are hegemonic in the technical sense later developed by Laclau and Mou¡e on the basis of Gramsci's work, which means that they are a part which represents the whole. This is why their revolution is a unique event, since they are not a part which represents nothing more than that part, and their political revolution will e¡ectively end politics as the struggle for power by competing interests and the imposition of those interests on those who do not rule. The workers represent the whole of society against that ruling class or elite which perpetuates their propertyless state and impotence, because their

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interests are not just their own, but are truly the common interest (GI: 68^9). Their commonality is de¢ned, as Laclau has it, simply by their opposition to the currently ruling class.11 The working class would not ideologically install its own interest as the general interest; rather its interests really coincide with the general interest. Thus Marx tells us that the domination of the proletariat abolishes domination, that the rule of a certain class is only the rule of certain ideas, and that this comes to an end as soon as class rule in general ceases to be the form in which society is organized; that is to say, as soon as it is no longer necessary to represent a particular interest as `general' or the `general interest' as ruling (GI: 69): `its domination [. . .] leads to the abolition of the old form of society in its entirety and of domination in general' (GI: 52). [T]he emancipation of society from private property [. . .] is expressed in its political form by the emancipation of the workers. This is not because only their emancipation is at stake but because general human emancipation is contained in their emancipation. (EcPh: 85) In this revolution, the hierarchy is not overturned, it is removed. Retrieving a recently defunct phrase, this truly would be the `end of history', history having been nothing but the arc of the detour taken by man's labour through the various inherited means of production, to return to the beginning. It is by way of the proletariat's homogenization and in light of their su¡ering, which appears to them through the discrepancy between themselves and the ones who enjoy rather than labour, that man is shown a truth beyond and behind his atomized individualized state of competition with all other individuals. This is the possibility of community. It is precisely by being so utterly homogenized in the capitalist mode of production that one sees oneself as a `universal individual' (cf. GI: 59), in kinship with the entire human race, the very species `man', in the form of the `Workers International'. Thus one envisions a community that would exceed all particular interests, a community of mankind. It is not simply that a community would be installed in place of the atomized society of bourgeois individualism and competition. This is perhaps not what Marx's talk of man's `species-life' intends. In the third of his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx speaks precisely of overcoming the dichotomy between individual and community, competing particular interests and the general interest represented by an alien State. The individual is the community. `It is above all necessary to avoid restoring society as a ¢xed abstraction opposed to the individual. The individual is the social being' (EcPh: 91). The community will be organized so as to serve his interests, and so his interests will be at one with the general interest. For this reason, Marx speaks of the proletariat as the class which `no longer counts as a class' (GI: 60), since class is de¢ned by a shared interest as opposed to another interest, in a political struggle (GI: 68^9, 85^6, PP: 210^11, B: 317^18).

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`Species' also refers to the general character which distinguishes man as an `animal' from all other animals, it is the whole character of a species, and in the case of man this amounts to free conscious activity, the doubling of technical production. And this free activity is precisely what would be allowed when this activity is no longer alienated by the division of labour, which is the very creation of labour as work which produces useful objects for others, the intercession of another between one's self and one's belongings and thus the prolonged alienation of oneself from oneself: `Labour [. . .] has lost all semblance of selfactivity and only sustains the worker's life by stunting it [. . .] material life appears as the end, and what produces this material life, labour [. . .] as the means' (GI: 96). When exchange is no longer necessary, one's activity is restored to `a complete and no longer restricted self-activity' (GI: 96): `only at this stage does self-activity coincide with material life' (GI: 97). One is no longer subjected to instruments of production and the division of labour, but rather `a mass of instruments of production must be made subject to each individual, and property to all' (GI: 97). This is the end of labour and the end of private property: `The transformation of labour into self-activity' (GI: 97), `private property comes to an end' (GI: 97). Marx does indeed speak of this as a return to one's naturality: `Communism as completed naturalism is humanism and as completed humanism is naturalism. It is the genuine solution of the antagonism between man and nature' (EcPh: 89). But this cannot mean returning man to nature as if he were or could ever be simply an animal, since man is de¢ned precisely by a split of which the animal knows nothing. Only as such [as a social man] has his natural existence become a human existence and nature itself become human. Thus society completes the essential unity of man and nature, it is the genuine resurrection of nature, the accomplished naturalism of man and the accomplished humanism of nature. (EcPh: 90) Indeed, Marx states explicitly that man is not entirely natural: `But man is not only a natural being' (EcPh: 105). And this is because he is also `forhimself ', which is to say possessed of the doubling of consciousness consequent upon the technical gap from nature. But precisely what is natural about man is his needs, and these will no longer be perverted into the doubling which labours to produce the mere means (money) with which to produce the means to satisfy needs. Marx speaks of individuals becoming complete again, `the development of individuals into complete individuals' (GI: 97), and at the same time of a reconciliation with nature. This could only mean that one maintains the gap which separates man from himself due to the necessity of production, but without the exchange which entirely alienates man from nature. It is a techne which remains rooted in physis.12 `The individual and the species-life [the animal life] of man are not di¡erent' (EcPh: 91). The individual becomes complete as the loop of

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his selfhood, while still externalizing him, is not torn away from him by the intercession of another in exchange, which entirely uproots man from nature since his work then loses all connection with nature as that from which use-value is wrought, and become entirely consumed in the necessity for exchange. This also retrieves `individuality' in a sense which is more properly described as `singularity'. Our singularity would be recovered from the homogeneous universal individuals that we have become. As Marx says, Eigenheit (ownness or peculiarity) is to be distinguished from Eigentum (property or belongings) (GI: 246).

Heidegger on Humanism and the Sameness of Communism and Capitalism Perhaps all we have just expounded is merely an unfolding of what Heidegger himself found so unique about Marx, since it is after all a tale of alienation and its relief. Heidegger identi¢es Marx's unique experience as one of man's `homelessness', his alienation: Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world. Hence it is necessary to think that destiny in terms of the history of being. What Marx recognised in an essential and signi¢cant sense, though derived from Hegel, as the estrangement of the human being has its roots in the homelessness of modern human beings. This homelessness is speci¢cally evoked from the destiny of being in the form of metaphysics, and through metaphysics is simultaneously entrenched and covered up as such. Because Marx by experiencing estrangement attains an essential dimension of history, the Marxist view of history is superior to that of other historical accounts. But since neither Husserl nor ^ so far as I have seen till now ^ Sartre recognises the essential importance of the historical in being, neither phenomenology nor existentialism enters that dimension within which a productive dialogue with Marxism ¢rst becomes possible. (LH: 258^9/170^1) In other words, what we have identi¢ed in Marx as escaping Heidegger's critique of metaphysicality and its humanism, his depiction of the genesis of man as an alienable subject, is what Heidegger himself ¢nds in Marx. It is his understanding of history insofar as it leads to alienation that sets Marxism apart. Heidegger is quite clear that Marx's thought thereby touches upon something essential to our age, and in a unique way. Marxism thinks on the basis of production: social production of society (society produces itself ) and the self-production of the human being as a social being. Thinking in this manner, Marxism is indeed the thought of today, where the self-production of man and society plainly prevails [herrscht]. (FS: 73/387)

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Heidegger relates this to the fact that man is himself lost in a process of enframing, locked in a framework of energy production and distribution, neither a subject nor an object but one more element in `the market of production and consumption': `the man of this production and of the consumption that belongs to it. This is the man of our present' (FS: 74/388). This is `the man who ¢nds himself today caught in the increasingly constraining network of socioeconomic ``imperatives'' [``ZwÌnge''] (which are, seen from the history of being, the precipitates of enframing [Gestell])' (FS: 74/389). Heidegger even goes so far as to align Marx's terms absolutely with his own: In enframing, the human is challenged forth [herausgefordert] to comport himself in correspondence with exploitation and consumption: the relation to exploitation and consumption requires the human to be in this relationship. (FS: 62^3/369^70)13 And for this reason, Heidegger, at least at one point, regards communism as an event, as practically revealing the truth of the age: No matter which of the various positions one chooses to adopt toward the doctrines of communism and to their foundation, from the point of view of the history of being it is certain that an elemental experience of what is world-historical speaks out in it. Whoever takes `communism' only as a `party' or a `Weltanschauung' is thinking too shallowly, just as those who by the term `Americanism' mean, and mean derogatorily, nothing more than a particular lifestyle. The danger into which Europe as it has hitherto existed is ever more clearly forced consists presumably in the fact above all that its thinking ^ once its glory ^ is falling behind the essential course of a dawning world destiny that nevertheless in the basic traits of its essential provenance remains European by de¢nition. No metaphysics, whether idealistic, materialistic, or Christian, can in accord with its essence, and surely not in its own attempts to explicate itself, `get a hold on' this destiny, and that means thoughtfully to reach and gather together what in the fullest sense of being now is. (LH: 259^60/171^2) This is why Marxism is the `thought of today' (FS: 73/387). Why would Heidegger privilege communism if not because it o¡ered some form of opposition to the `Americanism' devastating the earth, demonstrating in its very practice an alternative to unrelenting exploitation?14 But this would mean that while capitalism denies that it is based on power, class division, exploitation, communism would bring this out into the open. In Geschichte des Seyns, Heidegger reiterates that the essence of communism is `neither ``political'' nor ``sociological'', neither ``weltanschaulich'' nor ``anthropological'' ', but rather a conceptual grasping of `the jointure [FÏgung] of beings as such as a whole' (GA69: 191). In this way communism would be a privileged form of political thought: it would respond to the fact that being today is revealed by

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technology and as power, and would do so by explicitly sharing this power out among the entire community And yet despite all this, Heidegger is not a communist. Why? Because communism is concerned to emancipate man from the domination of political power. Marxism remains a humanism insofar as it is man's liberation which is taken as the ultimate end of the process of emancipation. `Marxism as a whole rests upon this thesis' that, `as Marx has it in the ``Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right'', ``To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But for man the root is man himself '' ' (FS: 73/387).15 Man is valorized above all else. `For Marx, it is decided from the outset that man and only man (and nothing else) is what matters [die Sache ist]' (FS: 77/ 394). For Heidegger this testi¢es to Marx's belonging to metaphysics and participating in the progress of nihilism, the nihilation of being: with Marx the position of the most extreme nihilism is reached. [. . .] in the doctrine which explicitly states that man is the highest being for man, one ¢nds the ultimate grounding and con¢rmation of the fact that being as being is nothing (nihil ) anymore for man. (FS: 77/393) The most pertinent question for Heidegger is: `can that man himself produce the means of working a way out of the pressure of the [socio-economic] ``imperatives''?' (FS: 74/389). He goes on to suggest that this would mean refraining from production, renouncing `progress' and `committing to a general restriction of consumption and production' (FS: 74/389). And yet any such gesture of opposition, any notion that we can so abstractly negate the sphere of consumption, still thinks in terms of production, thus we will not have avoided the most fundamental productionist prejudice. All human beings can do for Heidegger is merely to prepare (FS: 75/390). Any notion that man can force a new historical event from being is humanistic. It assumes man to be the (active) subject of history, able consciously by his thought or action to bring about revolutionary change. For Heidegger, `thinking abandons from the outset the primacy of consciousness, along with its consequence, the primacy of man. It was already said in ``The Letter on Humanism'' ' (FS: 73/387). In this letter, Heidegger says the following: But if one understands humanism in general as a concern that the human being become free for his humanity and ¢nd his worth in it, then humanism di¡ers according to one's conception of the `freedom' and `nature' of the human being. So too are there various paths toward the realisation of such conceptions. The humanism of Marx does not need to return to antiquity any more than the humanism that Sartre conceives existentialism to be [. . .] the humanitas of homo humanus is determined with regard to an already established interpretation of nature, history, world, and the ground of the world, that is, of beings as a whole

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Every humanism is either grounded in a metaphysics or is itself made to be the ground of one. Every determination of the essence of the human being that already presupposes an interpretation of beings without asking about the truth of being, whether knowingly or not, is metaphysical. (LH: 245/152^3) It is as a result of this humanistic remainder that communism, for all its promise, remains metaphysical, and `metaphysically the same' as capitalism, the same in being metaphysical, it is still an exploitation of nature for man's bene¢t: `the word of Lenin: Bolshevism is Soviet power ‡ electri¢cation. That means Bolshevism is the ``organic'', i.e., organized, calculating (and as ‡) conclusion of the unconditional power of the party along with complete technologization' (P: 86/127). This is the reason why Heidegger does not believe communism to be truly revolutionary with respect to capitalism: `Europe lies in the pincers between Russia and America,16 which are metaphysically the same' (IM: 47^8/34). He thus speaks of `the metaphysical essential sameness of these state-forms' (GA69: 189) and expresses the hope that, `[s]een from the Occidental point of view, the commonsensicality of democracies and the rational planning of the ``total authority'' will one day ¢nd and recognise each other as the same [dasselbe]' (M: 207/234). Why are they the same? Because they do not radically question man's relation to technology. They turn technological means to human ends rather than considering the underlying manner in which nature is revealed as energy for the powering of technology. Even if communism explicitly responds to the contemporary sending of being as power it does not think beyond the current epoch towards the possibility of another event, a revelation of being beyond power, beyond energy. Did Heidegger ultimately believe that any system of politics could be adequate to being? Could politics as such question the event of being which sends itself as power? Heidegger once thought National Socialism could. In the end, the only thing Heidegger is sure of is that a politics which would be ontological would not be democracy, and its economic system would not be capitalism. In the `Letter on Humanism', Heidegger suggests that communism is a response to an event of truth, and therefore the way seems open to imagine that Heidegger would be receptive to the possibility that communism, properly understood and properly actualized, might be capable of preparing mankind for a new sending of being. But in the actualized forms in which Heidegger experienced it in the ¢rst half of the twentieth century, and in his own ^ perhaps incomplete ^ understanding of Marx, communism remained a metaphysical politics insofar as it still considered nature to be a resource of raw material and energy.17 The question throughout this work has been whether it is possible to approach, if not disclose, a nature that would be seen otherwise than in human terms. This humanism and its failure to address a problem deeper than capitalism, technology itself, and therefore the place of man within nature, or in respect of

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nature, is the reason why Heidegger speaks of the essential sameness of capitalism and communism. This implies by itself that the proletariat revolution is not enough. It remains on the plane of human emancipation, and does not free nature from its enslavement to humanity and technology. Why does Marx focus on man as the one who in his homogeneity comes to represent the whole, the proletarian human being as the one in which the truth of the whole of beings manifests itself? Does this not embody a humanistic presupposition regarding the site of manifestation that we have already unmasked? Is it not rather the case that, since we are all `parts of nature', nature is the hegemonic element, whose protection is to the bene¢t of all and whose `particular interest' is thus at the same time identical with the `general interest'? While Marx would have recognized the essentially historical dimension of human life as leading to man's progressive separation from himself (`alienation'), his thought would remain embedded in metaphysics to the extent ^ and only to the extent ^ that it understood the site of historical action to be the human being.18 It is not man who will revolt, or whose exploitation today is most likely to stir a political revolution: rather, it is the thing, which we have understood to be the trace of nature. And if capitalism is strong enough to quell the discontent of the proletariat, it cannot be so powerful as to quell the distress of nature, if only because it depends on this nature as a source of raw material necessary for its very continuation. This is why today even the capitalist sometimes feigns to be concerned at the impending disaster. It is as if nature were about to go on permanent strike. But capitalism is perhaps its own death wish. Millions will perish through its folly, and not just human beings. Perhaps nature's only hope is that capitalism will also hurl itself into the void.

Conclusion In the epigraph to this book we have seen Heidegger ask, `Why does the earth keep silent amidst this destruction?' (CTP: 195/277). May we say that today, ¢nally, nature is breaking its silence? The hope of revolution is placed by Marx in the human being. But today, given the Heideggerian insight into the homogenization of man and nature, their blurring into one entirely self-steering grid of resources, all forced to yield up as much energy as possible, can we any longer believe in man's power to revolt? At least man speci¢cally? Heidegger's insight is that in light of this homogenization, which in fact means that today we are in the greatest danger and the greatest proximity to the truth, it is nature, and man only so far as he is a part of nature, which is likely to be the agent of revolution, that entity which puts in question the entirety of the current order. We are witnessing the beginnings of this today. The only question remaining is whether the vested economic interests of the dominant political powers will manage to snu¡ out the light emerging from

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the earth's ¢ssure and ameliorate the extremity of the breaking point which Marx and Heidegger both understood to be revelatory; or whether the extremity will grow to such an extent that it illuminates the most basic reasons for the destruction of nature, and the very destruction of the entire dichotomy of nature and culture, which the excess of the latter has brought about. That is why the ethical attitude today can only be the furtherance of the revelatory extreme of the natural catastrophe, the apocalypse of nature with which we began, a refusal to accept any compromise which the capitalists would assert, to temporarily suture the gap which brooks no suture. This is what Heidegger means when he speaks of `going along with technology', `accomplishing'19 an action that is already taking place without man's assistance. And this movement, a phenomenological movement it might be said, is the ethical movement we are today called to undertake: thought trims its sail to this wind. It is the phenomenology of the inapparent which today takes the form of a phenomenology of the end of phenomenality, the destruction of the human world along with the natural earth, which the uprootedness of the one from the other has precipitated. The gap in the whole, the ¢ssure of the symbolic world through which a dying nature cries out, must be held open. It is insofar as he does this that man is indeed the `guardian of being'.

Notes Introduction: On the Apocalypse of Nature 1. `Gathering together (Versammlung) is always what Heidegger privileges' (Derrida 1987 [1985]: 182). `[B]eing, that will be the same, the gathering of the same: Versammlung, Sein, Logos' (Derrida 1993 [1989]: 184). `To make enigmatic what one thinks one understands by the words ``proximity'', ``immediacy'', ``presence'' (the proximate, the own [ propre], and the pre- of presence), is my ¢nal intention in this book' (Derrida 1974 [1967]: 70). `[I]t is a fundamentally ``economistic'' ideology, systematically organising itself on the basis of the values, themes and motifs of the ``house'' and of the ``dwelling-place'' or ``abode'' (of the oikos), of ``dwelling'' and of ``building'', of the ``guard'' and of the ``safeguard'' (of Wahrheit), of the closed peasant or artisan economy (shepherds and carpenters), of the ``homeland'', of the ``native land'', of the ``familiar'', of the ``at home'' ^ Heimat, heimatlich, heimlich, heimisch, etc. Turning, consequently, into the slightly biting, reactive and reactionary protestation against the entirety of modernity (not merely against all the forms of uprooting, of errancy, of Befremdlichkeit and devastation, but also, at the weakest moments, against technology in the sense of industrialisation, cities, mass culture, means of information, etc.)' (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1997: 60), `everything which communicates, each time very profoundly, with the ``magnetisation'' of the proper' (ibid.: 62). `Striking, indeed, about Heidegger's entire vocabulary when addressing this question of the polis, of the historical dwelling and what we have come to call the national is the domestic economy to which it remains riveted, that is, the law of the oikos, of the home, the hearth and the house to which it is ultimately submitted. The Heim remains the standard, the ultimate value in the light of which the very possibility of a historical dwelling and the very possibility of the nation come to be measured. But there is no sense of this decisive move that takes place in the installation of the polis, the move of the hestia from the sphere of domestic economy to that of a political economy' (de Beistegui 1998: 144). `Must we conclude that phenomenology, insofar as it remains attached and subordinated to a problematic of presence and of donation is, from the start and forever, oriented toward a certain economy, toward a certain predilection for the home and the abode, for the shelter and the hearth?' (ibid.: 158) 2. Heidegger already speaks in these terms in Being and Time: `Animals also occur within the world without having been raised at all; and, in a way, these entities still produce themselves even when they have been raised' (BT: 100/70). 3. Winkler indicates that from the very start, Heidegger situated life ^ or, in the wake of Dilthey, `factical life' ^ where he would later situate the `event' (Winkler 2006b). A fruitful area of investigation into Heidegger's thought prior to Being and Time is here indicated.

Notes 4.

153

`Heidegger takes no account of a certain ``zoological knowledge'' [. . .] concerning what is brought together under this so general and confused word animality [. . .] this proposition marks the text's essential scene, marks it with a humanism that wanted certainly to be nonmetaphysical [. . .] but with a humanism that, between a human Geschlecht one wants to withdraw from the biologistic determination [. . .] and an animality one encloses in its organico-biologic programs, inscribes not some di¡erences but an absolute oppositional limit' (Derrida 1987 [1985]: 173^4). `Every time it is a question of hand and animal [. . .] Heidegger's discourse seems to me to fall into a rhetoric which is all the more peremptory and authoritarian for having to hide a discom¢ture. In these cases it leaves intact, sheltered in obscurity, the axioms of the profoundest metaphysical humanism' (Derrida 1989 [1987]: 11^12).

Chapter 1: The World and the Thing: Of Signi¢cation and Nature 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

Lest there be any doubt, with regard to the meaning of being, Heidegger at least once uses the phrase, `the temporarity of the individual Dasein' (BT: 477/425, my italics). And Heidegger has been criticized in this respect: does manifestation not occur between human beings, or to entire cultures, or even the globe? Heidegger's replication of the structures of the individual on the political level has of course been much examined in light of his Nazi engagement. But it is quite blatantly unfair to him if we do not read his later work before rushing to judgement (in fact, we should not judge at all). Being and Time was written in 1926; Heidegger lived for another ¢fty years and in that period he came to think the event of manifestation on a global and historical scale, and the event itself was no longer con¢ned to the individual, as we shall see. `[T]he rareness [Seltenheit ] of being [Sein]' (CTP: 281/400). The vertiginous feeling that dizzies us when this fact makes itself known to us is `anxiety' (Angst). Here we must speak metonymically, since we are referring to all forms of openness, not merely sight. Who has done more than Heidegger to expose the privilege given to sight as a result of metaphysics' forgetfulness of being? `[W]e de¢ne the formally existential idea of the ``Guilty!'' as ``being-the-basis [Grundsein] for a being [Sein] which has been de¢ned by a `not' '' ^ that is to say, as ``being-the-basis of a nullity [Grundsein einer Nichtigkeit]'' ' (BT: 329/283). How are we to think this? That there is something anthropologically speci¢able about this particular entity which means that death has an ontological e¡ect? We shall address this question in the following chapter, where we attempt to think birth and death as natural facts upon which the event of being is premised. Heidegger later rethinks this as the `mirrorplay' (Spiegelspiel) of the elements of the fourfold, as we shall see (Th: 179/172). Strictly speaking, one cannot say `actuality' since actuality arises only when it is opposed to possibility, and so before there was possibility there was no actuality. The opposition is posited by possibility, retrospectively. Parenthetically, I think it is this world of pure actuality without possibility, seen from the point of view of possibility, before the arising of a singular subject that owns itself, that Heidegger is attempting to depict in his description of das Man, the `one', that entity which does

154

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

Notes not yet belong to itself and hence does not yet have the right to use the ¢rst personal pronoun, which pronounces that I belong to myself. This is why Heidegger says that our circumspection dwells in the relationships between entities: `relationships in which concernful circumspection as such already dwells' (BT: 122/88). Such grammatical tortures are quite necessary here, since being precisely eludes the grammar which we have inherited from the Western metaphysical tradition and is elided by it. Being is possibility, the world of signi¢cations. This space which opens up between actual entities is the space of freedom, the space in which we might have `choice'. It is therefore also the space of obligation, since only a free entity can be obliged, morally. This is Heidegger's twist on Kantian practical philosophy. This is why Heidegger insists that his notion of world does not mean `beings as a whole' (BT: 93/65). World is the jointure which totalizes beings into a whole. This is Joan Stambaugh's excellent rendition from her translation of Being and Time (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996). I say this in criticism of all post-analytic `clari¢cations' of poor Heidegger who couldn't speak clearly for himself. Above all, what is so loathsome about analytic readings of Heidegger is that they clarify him in both senses: they render the very texture and di¤culties of Heidegger's text entirely facile, watery. The di¤culty of Heidegger's text must be addressed head-on and not ameliorated. Otherwise, one does not understand him. The result, in works such as that of Dreyfus, is a certain level of proud banality, which speaks of `background intelligibility' and `familiarity' but takes these words in accustomed senses and does not engage with the incredible depth to which Heidegger takes these words, their technical senses, which always partake of a complex relation with the history of these words. Heidegger's work is nothing without the rethinking and deepening of words such as `meaning', `intelligibility', `being'. There is no single ¢gure that one can claim to have read who will ensure that one is a `post-Kantian' or `continental' philosopher. What matters is how one reacts or does not react to the event that a text presents. Above all, analytic readers as such never believe that a thinker's work could open up an entirely new way of thinking, an entirely new logic. They do not believe there is one. In which case it is a mystery why they read at all, and no surprise to ¢nd that many don't. Here I draw the line. This is why poetry is so important for Heidegger: it is an instance of language in which the words simply cannot be passed over hastily and obliviously. Poetry is not primarily about the `message' or the `meaning' of the words with which it speaks. By `turning' I refer to the word `bewenden', crucial to Heidegger's analysis of world, translated by Macquarrie and Robinson as `involvement'. Bewenden derives from wenden, to turn, wind, wend or go, as a path doubles back on itself and circles its way up a mountainside. `An entity is discovered when it has been assigned or referred to something [auf etwas verwiesen ist], and referred as that entity which it is. With [mit] any such entity there is an involvement [Bewenden] which it has in [bei] something. The character of being which belongs to the ready-to-hand is just such an involvement [die Bewandtnis]' (BT: 115/84). This language of `turning' is often present in Heidegger's text and refers to the bars that link entities, their references to and from each other, in their di¡erential de¢nition. Entities turn (bewenden) towards their end, and ultimately towards man as their pole, as if they were the arm of a compass. Thus the language of `turning' refers to the necessarily oriented

Notes

17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

155

character of signifying references. If these references are not fundamentally oriented towards a certain pole (man), signi¢cation will not achieve the coherence necessary to be ¢xed. This very ¢xing of signi¢cation is the limited `world' which a situated man can survey. There is hardly a lecture course in the years immediately following 1926 in which Heidegger will not stoutly defend himself against this accusation (cf. BPP: 296/420, MFL: 188^9/243^4 et al.). This will turn out to be precisely the problem with Heidegger's description of world and will necessitate the incorporation of a de-humanized `earth'. Beings at this stage are fully intelligible to man and all that can appear strictly speaking must be intelligible, must be that which can be jointed into a world. This has seemed to many to leave Heidegger with a gap between the actual material which tools are made of and the possible uses which comprise the tool's being. We shall see that this question of `matter' is precisely what Heidegger comes to address with the notion of `earth', and eventually the thing, as we pursue it throughout this book. So in fact empiricism contradicts itself: empiricist entities cannot be experienced. They have no ability to appear. This is why the scientist addresses them in formulae, mathemes, which are as far as possible from anything intelligible to us, anything intuitive or signi¢cant. Was Kant the ¢rst to see this, with his assertion that empirical entities must be conditioned if they are to appear? Is this another example of `formally indicative' substantivization? A noun indicating a process or event. `The existential-ontological foundation of language is discourse' (BT: 203/161). Heidegger only inconsistently distinguishes Be¢ndlichkeit, the ontological form of mood, the a¡ective ¢nding of oneself, and mood (Stimmung). The former notion is soon abandoned after 1927. Hence we feel justi¢ed in collapsing the two notions here. Although this language of `limiting' already suggests a residue of Platonic theoreticism which renders understanding primary and moods a fallen derivative thereof, a limitation of an originally in¢nite understanding. This will change later as ¢nitude is situated not primarily in the human being, but in beings as a whole themselves. Hence, already, being is identi¢ed with history, insofar as history is described by the undulations caused by changes in the revelation of the whole of beings, such an epochal change alone being truly `historical' (MFL: 194/250^51, 208^9/270). `What withdraws from us, draws us along by its very withdrawal [. . .]. As we are drawing towards what withdraws, we ourselves are pointers pointing towards it [. . .]. Something which in itself, by its essential nature, is pointing, we call a sign [Zeichen]. As he draws toward what withdraws, man is a sign' (WCT: 9/11). `In indicating, a ready-to-hand equipment totality, and even the environment [Umwelt] in general, can be provided with an availability which is circumspectively oriented; and not only this: establishing a sign can, above all, reveal' (BT: 111/80, my italics). The Umwelt in general can be indicated by a su¤ciently empty signi¢er. For the early Heidegger, this empty signi¢er, this void around which the whole of the signi¢er turns, is man. Later, it will be the thing. Thus the sign is an inchoate thinking of the thing. I am very close here to de Boer's excellent analysis of the sign, which should be referred to here (cf. de Boer 2000: 96^7). In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), Heidegger describes himself as carrying out the `metaphysics of metaphysics' (cf. KPM:1/1).

156

Notes

30. Perhaps we need to traverse two distinct stages here: 1) world and earth must be distinguished and related, to allow appearance to be partially unintelligible, then 2) man and god must be distinguished and related, to ensure that beings as a whole are not totalized (including the unintelligible elements): thus, ironically, the god who formerly guaranteed totality is brought back to prevent its reintroduction. If there is a god then there is always something beyond our reach. Perhaps this is an eschatological thought, in that there is always something missing from the `totality' of beings, always yet to come. 31. But can even the present-at-hand appear if abstracted from signi¢cant appearance? Heidegger would later come to the think the present world as involving the very disappearance of appearance itself. Mathematical physics has already reduced this world in itself to formulas of pure syntax without signi¢cance, while technology has reduced it to a meaningless gyration. 32. Thus Heidegger is not saying that Nietzsche and by extension science and technology are `wrong' but is rather drawing our attention to the £ipside of their conclusion as to the immanence of beings, Nietzsche's `being is nothing but a vapour' and science's `there is nothing besides beings'. This is the ambiguity in which we must maintain ourselves today. 33. And birth? The birth of the world? Man is not situated, but the thing is, and this de¢nes the historico-geographical moment of the world. Might we say that while for the early Heidegger actual death drew Dasein back to its birth, for the later Heidegger the birth of the whole indicates its possible death and therefore an epochal change in the world? That the whole was born promises its death, in an historic moment. 34. The trace is `the nonpresence of the other inscribed within the sense of the present' (Derrida 1974 [1967]: 71). 35. I have attempted to establish this in Heidegger and the Place of Ethics (2005), Chapters 1 and 2. To some extent, I rely on those analyses here. 36. We must ask whether such a thing is of importance only at this stage in being's history, where the void is entirely closed out and we are presented with the fantasy that nothing, not even ourselves, needs to die, since any entity can be repeated identically by means of technological reproduction.

Chapter 2: Lacan and Heidegger on the Thing 1. `[H]e [Heidegger] develops his dialectic around a vase [vase]' (SVII: 120). The di¡erence is immaterial since the important thing for Heidegger is the capacity to pour, and a vase can presumably do that. One might postulate that Lacan speaks of a vase since this better suits his anthropological approach: jugs are perhaps rather less common archaeological ¢nds than vases and are more at home in Heidegger's more contemporary world. Lacan refers to Heidegger on several other occasions throughout this Seminar. In his discussion of das Ding he refers explicitly to Heidegger's `Geviert' or fourfold (SVII: 65^6). Lacan also refers to Heidegger's `The Origin of the Work of Art' (SVII: 297), which we could certainly hear echoing in Lacan's reference to the temple as an artwork composed around emptiness (SVII: 135^6, 140), for Heidegger there speaks of the temple as housing the god, who has now quit the world (OWA: 41^2/30^1).

Notes

2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

157

There are other subtler references to Heidegger in Lacan's text, including two references to `being' and `beings', where being is understood in a Levinassian way as the self-relation which a being assumes in hypostasis, thus individuating itself, or rather rendering it a singularity (SVII: 214, 248). This is what Heidegger means when he speaks of the dark origin of light, the origin of light in a clearing for light. In truth, what follows with regard to techne forces us to understand more literally Heidegger's apparent metaphor of the clearing in the forest, der Lichtung, cleared of course by man. Duration here does not mean a measurable length of time but the speed at which a stretch of time is ¢lled up, the very tension of this stretch, as a span of time is journeyed through. Heidegger tells us that philosophy is `both: the distant look in to the most concealed essence of being and the nearest cherishing [GlÏcken] of the emerging shape of beings which shelter' (CTP: 50/72). `The way that begins here and the way that begins with a being have to come together' (CTP: 271/388). Heidegger is often explicit about this. For instance, `the being of beings means being which is beings [welches das Seiende ist]. The `is' here speaks transitively, in transition. Being here becomes present in the manner of a transition to beings' (ID: 64/132). Stiegler (1998) provides a fascinating development of this myth. In his analysis of worldhood, Heidegger gives as the primary example of the use of tools the building of a shelter: `with hammering, there is an involvement in making something fast; with making something fast, there is an involvement in protection against bad weather; and this protection ``is'' for the sake of providing shelter for Dasein' (BT: 116/84). He also invokes the two other innate needs of the anthropological human being: `Even ``concern'' with food and clothing, and the nursing of the sick body, are forms of solicitude' (BT: 158/121). I am relying here on a lengthy analysis of conscience to be found in Heidegger and the Place of Ethics, Chapters 1 and 2. Heidegger himself states that modern technology is distinguished by the application of power machinery to production (cf. QCT: 13/13), although he is more concerned that the transition be understood in terms of the way in which nature is forced to reveal itself, the way it is challenged to yield energy in a way that it never was before. Does this challenging presuppose the technical means with which to carry it into e¡ect, or are things the other way around? `Techne perfects or completes what physis of itself cannot ¢nish, or it imitates [mimetai] physis' (Physics: 199a16^17). Compare the often remarkable and vehement autobiographical sketch in the Appendices to Mindfulness: `Nevertheless, viewed from the standpoint of these retrospective observations, ``Time and Being'' [the unpublished section of Being and Time], that totally inadequate section would have been in the end quite important had it been printed. This publication would not have let the misinterpretation of Sein und Zeit as a mere ``ontology'' of man and the misconstrual of ``fundamental ontology'' go as far as these misinterpretations have gone and are going' (M: 367/414). On this question I must refer the reader to Winkler 2006b. Sadly, the profusion of insights provided by this work arrived too late to shape the present work as they certainly should. The axiom of Winkler's work is that Heidegger's thought rests on the presupposition of a distinction between human and animal life, techne and

158

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

Notes physis, which must be understood without ignoring the insights of `empirical' science, particularly biology and (philosophical) anthropology, as, according to Winkler, Heidegger was prone to do. If I were to try and situate the present work with respect to that which is now being carried out by several scholars of Heidegger (and much else besides) which I would like to propose as the most advanced that exists anywhere in the world ^ I am speaking of the work of William Allen, Tom Greaves and Rafael Winkler ^ under the tutelage of Miguel de Beistegui, I would say that my concern here is to apply Heideggerian insights, precipitately, to that which is most urgent, to open up a polemic and perhaps a new way of thinking about the problematic which Heidegger brings before us. I cannot claim to have been able to incorporate their many insights into the most basic thrust of this work. In that case, let this work serve merely as a gateway to theirs. One ¢nds here an amazing discourse on clocks and shadows (BT: 468^9/415^16). Haar speaks of this passage (Haar 1993 [1987]: 21^4). Although, as we are insisting, the impending natural apocalypse is gradually compelling contemporary man to realize the possibility of an absolute other, a genuinely futural event. `[T]he Other, that prehistoric, that unforgettable other' (SVII: 56). One might have expected Lacan to say `beyond-of-the-signi¢er' (le hors-signi¢ant) here. But if `beyond of the signi¢ed' is a correct transcription then it will mean the signi¢ed in the sense of the object of desire or the real, and so would perhaps speak in the subjective genitive case. We have already seen Lacan refer to `both the real of the subject and the real he has to deal with as exterior to him' (SVII: 118, my italics), and `[r]ight at the beginning of the organisation of the world in the psyche, both logically and chronologically, das Ding is something that presents and isolates itself as the strange feature around which the whole movement of the Vorstellung turns' (SVII: 57, my italics). `[W]hat is pain? Pain rends [reiÞt]. It is the rift [RiÞ] [. . .]. Pain is the dif-ference [Unter-schied] itself ' (L: 204/27). It is clearly a choice on the part of the transcribers and stenographers of the seminar as to when to capitalize `la chose'. In some cases both amanuensis and translator capitalize the `chose' of `Autre-Chose' or `Other-Thing'. But we believe that this is not consistent with the logic of Lacan's argument. The Thing is precisely to be distinguished from its representational e¡ects (which retrospectively cause the Thing), which are `things' with a minuscule `t'. Perhaps `Autre' may be capitalized to indicate precisely the primacy of this plurality of Others over the one `Same' (Thing) which is a mirage created by this plurality. (It should be noted that `autre-chose' is common parlance for `something else'. We might translate it thus, as `some-thing else'.) The imaginary consistency given to this metonymic series of objects of desires is later given the name `object a', the cause of desire in the object, the fact that we imagine it to represent the Thing that we lost when we entered the symbolic order of the signi¢er. Lacan speci¢es that this includes any projections which psychoanalysis itself makes. Perhaps this is why he will agree with Freud's assessment of his discussion of the death-drive as a `speculation': `I don't even say that at this point of speculation things still have a meaning. I simply want to say that the articulation of the death drive in Freud is neither true nor false. It is suspect; that's all I a¤rm' (SVII: 213).

Notes

159

22. For Heidegger as well, the work of art is characterized by refusing to elide that (natural material) from which the entity is made and focuses on something over and above the object's utility: `Because it is determined by usefulness and serviceability [Dienlichkeit und Brauchbarkeit], equipment takes into its service that of which it consists: the matter. In fabricating equipment ^ e.g., an axe ^ stone is used, and used up. It disappears into usefulness' (OWA: 46/34^35). 23. `[I]n the order of ends, man (and every rational being) is an end in himself, i.e., he is never to be used merely as a means for someone (even for God) without at the same time being himself an end' (Kant 1993 [1788]: 138), `nevertheless that law, act in accordance with the maxims of a member giving universal laws for a merely possible kingdom of ends, remains in its full force because it commands categorically. And just in this lies the paradox that the mere dignity of humanity as rational nature, without any other end or advantage to be attained by it, hence respect for a mere idea, is yet to serve as an in£exible precept of the will, and that it is just in this independence of maxims from all such incentives that their sublimity consists, and the worthiness of every rational subject to be a lawgiving member in the kingdom of ends' (Kant 1998 [1785]: 46). 24. Cf. Lacan 1994 in particular. 25. Although more precisely, the Thing speaks from the burning bush (cf. SVII: 180). 26. In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger will discuss this characteristic of the produced being, which depends on man for its production but then achieves independence (cf. BPP: 112^16/158^65). Heidegger recalls this analysis in `The Thing': `Plato experienced (decisively [maÞgebend], indeed, for the sequel) everything present as an object of making [als Gegenstand des Herstellens]' (Th: 168/170). 27. Cf. SVII: 55. 28. Heidegger later explicitly refers to Kant's appropriation of the thing in itself: `The thing-in-itself means for Kant: the object-in-itself. To Kant, the character of the ``in-itself '' signi¢es that the object is an object in itself without reference to the human act of representing it, that is, without the opposing ``ob-'' [``Gegen'']' (Th: 177/178). But perhaps this abstraction from appropriation is the only way in which one can reach the `thing', in which case Heidegger would be in¢nitely close to Kant in this respect. 29. Derrida points out that `und dennoch . . .' (`and yet . . .') is used by Heidegger `more often than one would think': this too is a trope which takes back what was previously stated, or quali¢es it, as if a second look disquali¢ed what had previously been laid down (Derrida 1991 [1985]: 383). 30. `The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surge of the surf, and its own repose brings out the raging of the sea. Tree and grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket ¢rst enter into their distinctive shapes and thus come to appear as what they are. The Greeks early called this emerging and rising in itself and in all things physis. It clears and illuminates, also, that on which and in which man bases his dwelling. We call this ground the earth' (OWA: 42/31). `Earth is the serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up into plant and animal' (BDT: 149/151). 31. Heidegger cites the aeroplane and television: in German, Fernsehen, or `seeing far' (Th: 165/167, Fernsehapparatur). 32. Z­iz­ek suggests that the project to be pursued by the contemporary Left is to remember and protect the memory of things in the guise of `lost causes', failed revolutionary attempts (cf. FTKN: 272^3). What is the thing (causa) if not a `lost cause'?

160

Notes

33. Heidegger adds in a note from 1950, `Gestell as the most extreme oblivion and equally [zugleich] as the hint [Wink] of Ereignis' (HW: 343). 34. Such language I do not believe to embody an anthropomorphization, any more than Heidegger's attributing `need' and `distress' (Not) to being itself. Rather, man's cries are one specialized, perhaps peculiar form of a more general characteristic, which occurs when something is sti£ed, a sti£ing which threatens complete eradication and stirs the thing's revelation at the very last moment before its extinction. 35. `We can use [benutzen] technical objects, and yet with the correct [sachgerechten] use also hold ourselves free of them [ freihalten] so that we may let go of them at any time [. . .] I would name this bearing [Haltung] towards the technicized world of a ``yes'' and a ``no'', by an old word: releasement towards things [die Gelassenheit zu den Dingen]' (DT: 54/24^5). 36. We might postulate that this is precisely the compliancy that thought must enter, in the `FrÎmmigkeit' of thinking, questioning (QCT: 35/36). In other words our thought would then have to trace the boundaries between man and god, world and earth, the dwelling together of man and nature, the watchful guardianship of the boundary, that is sensitive to the dangerous incursions and excesses of anthropic and technological exploitation. Questioning is a stance that approaches a totality but does not accept it as such (cf. McNeill 1992); it rather ¢nds a foothold and asks after the totality's grounds. If today's totality is the standing reserve (Bestand ) demanded and manufactured by machinery, then questioning would attempt delicately to prise open the fault-line that runs between man's techne and the folds of physis, a time that is strained to breaking point by being forced to yield at the near in¢nite speeds of technology's exploitation, whose time the craftsman of the thing and the untamed entities of nature remain attuned to. And here one might also be tempted to rethink Stimmung as an attunement to the time of nature, to the rhythms and folds of the inhuman, since after all Stimmung was always the access man had to the unchosen facts which characterized himself. We have tried to think the most primordial facts about man as a consequence of nature: his death and birth, his anxiety and his joy. In an earlier work, we suggested that the moods appropriate to today were horror and gentleness (cf. Lewis 2005: 125). Can we now say that horror should be our attitude towards technology, and gentleness our timid approach to nature which has been so brutalized? 37. `[A]rti¢cial material which increasingly replaces the ``natural'' material. There, too, nature withdraws as nature' (FS: 62/369). 38. And once singularity becomes de¢ned in these terms, I do not believe that the determination of a singular thing necessarily eludes science. Heidegger is often taken, understandably, to suggest that science, by homogenizing space, cannot recognize things. But if we determine singularity in so bare a way as the unique time and space which an entity occupies, why should science not have some input into the de¢nition of a thing's singularity? Heidegger perhaps alludes to this in the following: `How even modern physics was compelled by the facts themselves to represent the spatial medium of cosmic space as a ¢eld-unity determined by body as dynamic centre, cannot be discussed here' (BDT: 156/158). 39. On the world as historical, organized around the ahistorical kernel of the void marked by the dead thing: `What is ``past''? Nothing else than that world [Heidegger's emphasis] within which they belonged to a context of equipment and were encountered as ready-to-hand and used by a concernful Dasein who

Notes

161

was-in-the-world. That world is no longer. But what was formerly within-the-world with respect to that world is still present-at-hand' (BT: 432/380). 40. If Derrida does not leave room in his thought for such an entity as the thing, does he thereby deny himself the possibility of explaining revolutionary change? When considering the prospect of change as the event of a futural otherness, does it not seem that Derrida feels compelled to remain in an impotent attitude of mere `hoping'? Perhaps this stance prevents us from encouraging such change. The lack of a thing, a traumatic void within the symbolic to mark the elided place of nature, would then leave Derrida unable either to explain or to precipitate revolutionary change, the upheaval of an entire symbolic order, as in such things as the French or Russian revolutions, or indeed the industrial revolution, perhaps even the Holocaust and the environmental cataclysm. Indeed, one of Derrida's constant criticisms of ¢gures such as Heidegger and Foucault, the subtlety of which we cannot go into here, concerns their notion of epochs, epochal changes in history, that are neatly demarcated (cf. Derrida 1989 [1987]: 12). On our account, however, Derrida's criticism becomes a symptom of his own de¢ciency. It shows that Derrida precisely cannot acknowledge such a thing as an epochal change since he lacks a thought of the thing which makes such change possible. For Derrida, the `thing-in-itself ', an actual quilting point at which the symbolic is joined to the real, to nature in itself, is a `mirage' (Derrida 1974 [1967]: 157). For Lacan and Heidegger it is a miracle. Nature breaks through the sti£ing web of the signi¢er. Thus, with the thought of the thing as the mark of nature within culture, at the origin of the event of being and, today, as being's distress, Heidegger stretches beyond (the reach of) deconstruction. 41. For bibliographic help with this chapter, along with Chapter 5 and the Preface, I must thank Darren Ambrose, Matthew Broome, Nick Butler, Lorenzo Chiesa, Jim Graham, Peter Larkin, Damian Veal and Rafael Winkler for their help in obtaining the required texts; Mum for lending me the use of her library; Tom Greaves for his ever uncomplaining help with references; Michael Kolkman for the gracious sharing of his computer; and Hilary Chapman for the invaluable support (my book-stand).

Chapter 3: Levinas and Heidegger: The One and the Incompleteness of Beings 1.

2. 3. 4.

Which Derrida recognizes to be `a silent axiom' of his work: `In¢nity (as in¢nitely other) cannot be violent as is totality (which is thus always de¢ned by Levinas [. . .] as ¢nite totality: totality, for Levinas, means a ¢nite totality. This functions as a silent axiom)' (Derrida 2001 [1964]: 133). Derrida denies that his points are strictly speaking `criticisms' or even questions put to Levinas himself; rather, they are `the questions put to us by Levinas' (Derrida 2001 [1964]: 104). As has become standard, I use `Other' to translated `autrui', capitalized or not, and `other' to translated `autre', and I take the former to mean the human other, the other of the self, and the latter to mean otherness tout court, the other of the same. This is philosophy's tendency to appropriate the non-philosophical. Levinas at ¢rst denies Aristotle's phrase `when one does not philosophize one still has to

162

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Notes philosophize', in explicit de¢ance of Derrida: `Not to philosophise would not be ``to philosophise still '' ' (GP: 148/DVI: 126), and yet he later accepts it unconditionally: `This putting in question of the ontological priority is a question that is posed, philosophically, against philosophy [. . .] (This would be like the realisation of Aristotle's remark: not to philosophise is to philosophise still)' (GDT: 129/DMT: 147). Thus we ¢nd Levinas explicitly `recognising the impossibility of any presentation of meaning outside of a Said' (GDT: 131/DMT: 149). This vacillation expresses Levinas's uncertainty as to whether the ethics that attends to the erasure of the other, and that is a necessary condition of philosophy as the science of beings as a whole, is itself `philosophy'. We can presume that Derrida ¢nally and utterly convinced him of this necessity to speak in Greek, the language of philosophy. `Face' describes the singularity of an entity, the way it signi¢es in the mode of `expression' by which a being presents itself from beyond the horizon of its own (always generic) being. It is `the way in which the other presents itself, exceeding the idea of the other in me [La manie© re dont se pre¨ sente l'Autre, de¨passant l'ide¨e de l'Autre en moi]' (TI: 50/43). Here we must be careful to note the word `presents': the face is a trace, the way in which `absence' presents itself in presence. Levinas will sometimes refuse the discourse of `experience' outright: `The welcoming of the face and the work of justice ^ which condition the birth of truth itself ^ are not interpretable in terms of disclosure [de¨ voilement]' (TI: 28/13), believing the very notion of experience to be idealist. But again, he vacillates as to the necessity of using the Greek language of ontology and phenomenological experience. Sometimes he will speak of an `experience' of that which cannot be experienced: `The relation with in¢nity will have to be stated in terms other than those of objective experience; but if experience means precisely a relation with the absolutely other, that is, with what always over£ows thought, the relation with in¢nity accomplishes experience in the fullest sense of the word' (TI: 25/10). Perhaps a Germanic distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung is called for here. Heidegger himself refuses the word `Erlebnis', which he links with the dazzling presence of technology and giganticized actuality (cf. CTP: 90^3/129^34). The face-trace can be experienced, but the beyond of the face, god, cannot be experienced at all. I wonder if god may be understood as absolute uniqueness and hence in a certain sense impossible, while the face, since it is present, can never be absolutely unique. Because I am one brother among equals inasmuch as I stand in a one-toone relation with god I can never be absolutely unique nor encounter absolute uniqueness. Levinas clearly acknowledges that it is impossible ever to leave ontology behind. Ontology becomes ethics when it realizes that it is premised upon an erasure. In other words, in order to be complete, ontology must admit that it is incomplete, in order not to be unethical. Philosophy began in the inadequacy and asymmetry of wonder, it is a witness (te¨moignage) given to the exterior real that curves the mirror, but immediately it forgets this (OB: 119/AE: 153). Levinas asserts the necessity of the prior separation of narcissistic subjectivity for the relation between self and Other in the following terms: `Egoism, enjoyment, sensibility, and the whole dimension of interiority ^ the articulations of separation ^ are necessary for the idea of In¢nity, the relation with the Other which opens forth from the separated and ¢nite being' (TI: 148/158). This entity is `in a certain sense a substance' (EE: 81/138). It is the ego, the `I'. `The alterity, the radical heterogeneity of the other, is possible only if the other is other with respect to a

Notes

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

163

term whose essence is to remain at the point of departure, to serve as entry into the relation, to be the same not relatively but absolutely. A term can remain absolutely at the point of departure of relationship only as I ' (TI: 36/25). Levinas relates the patience shown towards death to the patience which characterizes questioning (GDT: 142^3/DMT: 165). Here he recognizes that death puts the ego in question due to its unactualizable nature: he also understands that, for Heidegger, death's ontological function is to institute the questionable nature of Dasein's totality, its incompleteness, although he still seems to believe that before death there was an ego that was complete. Nevertheless, Levinas's understanding of the question here seems to be opposed to Derrida's understanding of it: questioning is one of the few forms of thought, along with `hope, desire, [and] searching', that think more than they can think and thus open towards the other (GDT: 172/ DMT: 201). At least once, Levinas suggests that otherness and death are not in fact identical but merely approach us from the same `region': `The Other [. . .] is situated in the region from which death, possibly murder, comes' (TI: 234/259^60, my italics). This could be a reference to the absolute other of god as an otherness which cannot be identi¢ed with death, but Levinas uses the word `Autrui ', which suggests that we are speaking of a certain separation between the human and that death which opens the One to the other. It is clear in Totality and In¢nity that otherness is not exhausted by death since a more other otherness is to be found `beyond the face' and thus beyond death in the form of the future of the child produced in erotic fecundity. But, as with the absolute other of god, the only experiential access to this otherness is by way of the face and the death which it presents. On this topic there seems to be an oscillation in Levinas whose law I have been unable to determine. `My death is my part in the death of the Other' (GDT: 39/MT: 44): here it must be my own death that opens me to the fragility of the Other. But Levinas also says that death appears in the face of the other man and so belongs to the Other. `We shall have to attempt to start from murder as suggesting the complete meaning of death' (GDT: 106/MT: 122). It seems that, here, the Other's death reveals to me my ¢nitude, since my own death is precisely that which I cannot experience. Beyond this oscillation, one might wonder if Levinas is attempting to sublate the alternative between my death and the Other's in his later notion of sacri¢ce or my dying for the Other (cf. DF: 217/EN: 229^30). Or was it rather the case that Levinas saw what became of otherness when death was understood in a `Heideggerian' way (as a possibility), and on this basis developed his own understanding of otherness as a¥icting a pre-existing ego (and rendering it in this respect powerless)? We know his early work was inspired by Heidegger as well as a need to escape him. One response to this would be to suggest that one has more power to save the Other from death, and Heidegger's very reason for insisting that death be my own is that the death of the Other can be made present: we can be present at another's death, and indeed, this death can cause Dasein to attend to its own death for the ¢rst time: `Cases of death [TodesfÌlle] may be the factical occasion for Dasein's ¢rst paying attention to death at all' (BT: 301/257), `Dasein can thus gain an experience of death, all the more so because Dasein is essentially being-with with others' (BT: 281/237). `[D]eath is ``known'' as a mishap which is constantly occurring ^ as a ``case of death'' [. . .]. ``Death'' is encountered as a well-known event [Ereignis] occurring

164

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

Notes within-the-world [. . .]. Das Man has already stowed away an interpretation for this event' (BT: 296^7/252^3). Since this event is pre-individual, one cannot say `one appropriates' and hence one is forced to say `appropriation appropriates' or `appropriation happens' (Das Ereignis ereignet) (TB: 24/24). This is `existence' not primarily in the sense of stretching-out but in a more Kierkegaardian, anti-Hegelian sense of that interiority which can be accessed only from the inside and must be lost to a totalizing, systematic, theoretical glance. Levinas explicitly identi¢es the two: `Proximity is thus anarchically a relationship with a singularity [une singularite¨ ] without the mediation of any principle, any ideality' (OB: 100/AE: 127). `The unique [l'unique] alone is irreducible and absolutely other' (PP: 166/343). The closest Levinas comes to saying that the One is singular is in his description of substance as kath'auto, self-related, de¢ned only by itself, absolute. Incidentally, kath'auto is a Greek term which Levinas does not spurn (cf. TI: 64^5/59^60), unlike tode ti (cf. TI: 59/TI: 52). Moving in the other direction, he later retrieves to auton and to heteron which in his early works are thought to subordinate Moi and Autrui to the logic of genus (TO: 94/TA: 89). Levinas seems to believe that the function of moods is no less appropriative than that of understanding. He describes the Stimmung of anxiety as itself a `comprehension', when in truth anxiety causes us to face the fact of death which escapes all comprehension (cf. BT: 174/135). But, as if his own understanding di¡ered from Heidegger's, he states elsewhere that man's relation to his singularity is e¡ected in the very ` ``obscurity'' of feelings' (`obscurite¨ ' des sentiments), their imperviousness to the light of understanding (EE: 100/172^3). This death is often translated into the desire for murder: `The temptation of total negation [. . .] is the presence of the face' (IOF: 9/EN: 21^2). `We shall have to attempt to start from murder as suggesting the complete meaning of death' (GDT: 106/MT: 122). But why not suicide? Why not the act of saving the Other from death, through love? What is important for Levinas is that murder institutes a relation to the death of the Other which is not indi¡erent to it: the temptation to murder indicates that the Other has questioned our power so incisively that we need to kill him in order to rea¤rm our authority. Something like a rift between the otherness of death and the death of the Other does appear from time to time in Levinas's work but is quickly closed o¡. For instance: `Freedom denotes the mode of remaining the same in the midst of the other' (TI: 45/36): here, death is not speci¢ed in its ownership. But then again, there is a di¡erence between not being owned at all and being indi¡erent as to one's owner, since in the latter a belonging of some kind is still presupposed. All Levinas can allow is a death that does belong but is indi¡erent to whom it belongs. Let us read our quotation again: `Freedom denotes the mode of remaining the same in the midst of the other'. Quite unequivocally, this implies that we are already constituted as the same before our encounter with otherness. This encounter can happen only by putting in question the One of the ego. Assuming that Levinas's work after Derrida's onslaught in 1964 may be termed his `later work' and the two `ontological' classics, From Existence to Existents and Time and the Other, the `early work'. The intermediate stage is marked by Totality and In¢nity. Heidegger is accused of being unable to admit such a thing as anonymous being before the process of individuation, which for him will always already have begun

Notes

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

165

(TO: 45/TA: 24). Perhaps one could give a charitable sense to this accusation by following Beistegui's criticism of Heidegger's putative insistence that being have an entity which possesses its `proper name' (cf. Beistegui 2003a). In fact, Levinas makes this admission long before Derrida is forced to by Dastur in 1986 (Derrida 1989 [1987]: 94). McNeill and Wood follow Dastur in pointing out that even in Being and Time a certain `given' precedes the question of being and is accessed in what Heidegger calls the `pre-understanding of being' (cf. McNeill 1993: 107^8 and Wood 1993: 75). See `Living o¡ . . .' et seq. in Totality and In¢nity (TI: 110^14/112^17). In early Levinas, the relation between world and enjoyment is slightly di¡erent in that the world seems here to possess su¤cient otherness to disrupt the subject's narcissistic enjoyment, its `enchainment' to itself. It is this world of light that frees me from my self, but ^ and here we rejoin the later work ^ only to initiate my freedom to appropriate other entities within the world and persist in narcissism. Must the interruption come from a human being? Could it not be any other, animal, vegetable, or mineral ^ nature ^, anything which demonstrates my world to be shared ? We have suggested above that the early Levinas did come close to believing that the `world' was su¤cient to interrupt the individual's narcissism: it did not require the Other. Levinas even entitled one of his books The Humanism of the Other Man but he does oscillate in this regard. At times he is quite explicit: `it is only man who could be absolutely foreign to me [il n'y a que l'homme qui puisse m'eª tre absolument e¨ tranger]' (TI: 73/71). `The dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face [le visage humain]' (TI: 78/76). And yet even in a relatively early essay he is already beginning to ask, `[c]an things take on a face?' (IOF: 10/EN: 23). Later, perhaps under the sway of Heidegger's later works, he becomes more assertive: `The face [Visage] is thus not exclusively a human face [la face de l'homme]' (PP: 167/344). Earlier attempts at a rapprochement between Levinas and Heidegger have ¢rmly restricted themselves to this terrain, and, to simplify, Levinas is understood to have a humanist ethics, and Heidegger an inhumanist ethics. Hence, a chiasmic joining of the two is urged. This argument for a broad complementarity between the two thinkers may be found in the work of Llewelyn (1991), Foti (1991), Benso (2002) and Dastur (2002). I, on the other hand, am arguing that Levinas's humanism runs much deeper than these commentators suspect and stretches down to the deepest ontological presuppositions of his thought. But Heidegger is not simply an inhumanist, as we shall see. `Teacher: Every kind of ground [Grund] yields an origin [Herkunft]; but not every origin has the manner of a ground [die Art des Grundes]. So origin must be in play where there are no grounds [wo es keine GrÏnde gibt]. Tower Watchman: Not even abysses [AbgrÏnde]. Suchlike prevails [waltet] only within the consideration [RÏcksicht] of grounds. Teacher: Thus we must think an origin which remains in the same way groundless and abyssless [grund- und abgrundlos] ^ something which is in fact an incoherent and impertinent demand for the accustomed representation which has long provided the measure [das gelÌu¢ge und langher maÞgebende Vorstellen]' (GA77: 200^1). Many thanks to Tom Greaves for revealing this conversation to me. Through sheer ingratitude I have slightly modi¢ed his translation. `World' and `earth' are the names Heidegger uses in the 1930s: I do likewise in order to refer the fourfold back to its phenomenological beginnings in the

166

32.

33.

34.

35.

Notes inadequacy of the concept of `world' (cf. Lewis 2005: 119^23 and Chapter 1 of the present work). `The immeasurability [UnmaÞ] of the mere being [nur Seienden], the non-being of the whole [Unseienden im Ganzen], and the rareness of being [Sein]' (CTP: 281/ 400). In his lectures on HÎlderlin's `Ister', Heidegger makes it clear that `Unseiende' is a translation of Plato's `me on' (cf. HI: 87^8/108^10). In which case, perhaps we should translate `the totality of non-beings', implying that, in the absence of Platonic ideas, all beings are non-beings: there is no being fully in being (no ontotheological god) and the me on would be original, as would its corresponding doxa, perspectivality (cf. Sallis 1990: Ch. 3). Would this undermine the very notion of wholeness as such, thus licensing our earlier translation? There can be a whole only if this whole has an absolute `outside' which guarantees its totality, an ontotheological god. Aristotle had already argued that the ontos on, the eide, do not explain manifestation. But originary me onta do. They are inherently individuated appearances. Hence Heidegger's focus becomes the simple and originary event of di¡erentiation or individuation (Ereignis) without prior substantive, and not `being' (Sein) at all. `[A]llow me to represent the function of the signi¢er by a spatialising device, which we have no reason to deprive ourselves of. This point around which all concrete analysis of discourse must operate I shall call a quilting point [ point de capiton] [. . .] this is the point at which the signi¢ed and the signi¢er are knotted together [. . .]. Everything radiates out from and is organized around this signi¢er, similar to those little lines of force that an upholstery button forms on the surface of material. It's the point of convergence that enables everything that happens in this discourse to be situated retroactively and prospectively' (Lacan 1993: 267^8). And does Spinoza, from whom we here borrow terminology, ever explain why this individuation takes place? (cf. Deleuze 1994 [1968]: 40). A philosophy such as Deleuze's might well put a similar question to Levinas and argue that the theological mistake is to begin from substance and ask how modes are derived from it. (Although I wonder if Levinas might evade this criticism with his later thought of eschatology, which evokes that which eludes the totality of history as the Same. Does eschatology attempt to provide a principle of otherness that would explain the totality's di¡erentiation, by summoning man up from the clay, by calling the il y a forth from out of itself? In other words: if death puts in question the One of the ego, does the messianic of eschatology put in question the One of the il y a? And yet, the messianic is clearly and avowedly transcendent. It is not immanent. Thus we still wonder as to its explanatory power.)

Chapter 4: Between Nature and Culture: Heidegger and Z­iz­ek on the Thing and the Subject 1. Z­iz­ek has issued a veiled threat to the life of anyone who brings up his very ¢rst book, on Heidegger, entitled The Pain of the Di¡erence (cf. Z­iz­ek and Daly 2004: 28). This shows two things: 1) the great and partially unexplained vigour with which Z­iz­ek disavows Heidegger from the standpoint of his mature thought; and 2) that Z­iz­ek was from the start su¤ciently well-schooled in Heidegger to justify our close critical scrutiny of his reading in all its phases. Clearly, Heidegger

Notes

2.

3.

4. 5.

167

was a foundational experience for Z­iz­ek: what does his later suppression reveal about Z­iz­ek's thought? Since this chapter was originally conceived, Z­iz­ek has published The Parallax View, which contains what is perhaps his most extended engagement with Heidegger outside of The Ticklish Subject. Let us brie£y examine its contents. In Chapter 1, Z­iz­ek makes some very perceptive remarks about the ontological di¡erence, which he rightly understands to embody Lacan's feminine formula of sexuation: in other words, it does not name a di¡erence between beings and something transcendent to them (as would be a masculine logic) but remarks the incompleteness of beings as a whole, as well as the absence of anything exceeding this `whole' (PV: 23^4, cf. 38): `Ontological di¡erence is not between the Whole of beings and their Outside, as if there were a Super-Ground of the All. In this precise sense, ontological di¡erence is linked to ¢nitude [. . .] which means that Being is the horizon of ¢nitude which prevents us from conceiving beings in their All. Being cuts from within beings: ontological di¡erence is not the ``mega-di¡erence'' between the All of beings and something more fundamental, it is always also that which makes the domain of beings itself ``non-all'' ' (PV: 24). These comments may be taken to expand on Z­iz­ek's earlier allusions to being as the void of the symbolic, which we shall examine later on. Z­iz­ek engages most extensively with Heidegger at the beginning of Chapter 5, which returns explicitly to the topic of Heideggerian politics. But an initial glance suggests that, when it comes to Heidegger, nothing fundamental has changed in the seven intervening years. We are led to expect that Z­iz­ek's next work, In Defence of Lost Causes, will also deal with Heidegger at length: a sign that Heidegger is indeed returning to haunt Z­iz­ek with increasing insistence; a sign of Z­iz­ek's indefatigable honesty. Perhaps it might be objected that we are being unjust to Z­iz­ek in not taking account of the methodology which he ¢rst avowed in Looking Awry (cf. LA: 3^12): the notion that a sly glance from aslant alone renders visible the anamorphotic object, the inherent perspectivality of reality itself. This approach is reiterated in The Ticklish Subject, as if to emphasize that, even in his discussion of Heidegger, it remains Z­iz­ek's procedure: `a cursory approach ignorant of details reveals (or even generates) the features which remain out of reach to a detailed, exceedingly close approach' (TS: 58). Z­iz­ek links this to the Hegelian and dialectical materialist ontology which has it that the essence of a thing does not fully become what it is until it appears, and therefore the gap between essence and appearance, substance and subject, is constitutive of essence, constitutive of substance; appearance is nothing but the appearance of essence (cf. TS: 58^9 and Hegel's `Force and the Understanding' in The Phenomenology of Spirit). In other words, there is no way to strip away appearance and reach essence, since if we lose appearance we lose essence. Reality comprises the division between essence and appearance. And since appearance is always appearance to a subject, in the anamorphotic stain the subject is inscribed in the object and is thus indispensable to it: substance needs subject, which is to say non-substance, in order to fully constitute itself. Cf. PV: 273. The so-called `pragmatist' reading was promulgated by Hubert Dreyfus in Beingin-the-world: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I (1991). To say in Dreyfus's defence that he has `now begun to read Division II' is akin to praising

168

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

Notes analytic philosophers for daring to venture beyond Kant's ¢rst Critique. In addition, there is simply no way that Heidegger can be made intelligible on the basis of the existential analytic alone. Such can only amount to an appropriation for other ends, an appropriation characteristic of analytic readings. `Heidegger takes as the starting point the active immersion in its surroundings of a ¢nite engaged agent who relates to objects around it as to something ready-at-hand [sic]' (TS: 15). I wonder if Z­iz­ek himself is implying this when he speaks elsewhere of a reversal of the `pragmatism' of the ¢rst part of Being and Time: `In the second part, however, the perspective is as it were reversed: the immersion in the life-world itself is not the original fact, but is conceived of as secondary with regard to the abyss of Dasein's ``thrown-ness'' [. . .] which is experienced in the mode of anxiety [. . .] it is ultimately from this abyss that we escape into engaged immersion in the world' (B: 106^7). Save for an interest in the third way between capitalism and communism attempted in Argentina by Peronism, as Z­iz­ek himself has revealed (cf. PV: 419, n. 33). The same claim is made independently by Christopher Ellis in The Primacy of Mourning: Heidegger, Hegel and Death, PhD thesis, Department of Philosophy, University of Essex, 2002. I wonder if we could hazard the thought that in his later search for a `politics of truth' Z­iz­ek tends to become more favourable to the idea of a short-circuit between the ontological and the ontic at the political level. `The question of being [. . .] would have grasped nothing of what is most questionworthy about it [ihrem eigenen FragwÏrdigsten] if it had not immediately driven onwards towards the question concerning the origin of the ``ontological di¡erence'' [Ursprung der ``ontologischen Di¡erenz'']' (CTP: 327/465). Heidegger's thought of being-history and Ereignis, his recon¢guration of what might once have been called `the historical a priori ', is intended to explain just this: radical changes in the possibilities which beings as a whole can display. Feltham (2006: 191) suggests that Z­iz­ek attempts to overcome this problem with his notion of the `vanishing mediator' which Z­iz­ek de¢nes as `a necessary intermediate step [. . .] in the passage from ``prehuman nature'' to our symbolic universe' and which he identi¢es as the `radical withdrawal of the subject from the world' to be found in Schelling and the young Hegel (FA: 82). We witness Z­iz­ek's recognition that the later Heidegger shares his problematic when we compare his suggestion that Heidegger's reading of Cartesian subjectivity fails to recognize its ambiguous swaying between an excessive void dimension and the philosopher's attempts to domesticate it, with an earlier comment from 1991: `each epochal experience of the truth of Being is a failure, a defeat of thought's endeavour to capture the Thing. Heidegger himself ^ at least in his great moments ^ never fell into this' (FTKN: 137, n. 2). Z­iz­ek is referring to Heidegger's celebration of Socrates as the `purest thinker of the West' who stood fast in the draft where all who came after him would £ee, the one who dared to write nothing. It is curious that Z­iz­ek should understand Heidegger to be saying that a human being (a `subject'?) acts as the place-holder for this void: `Socrates was the only one who endured in this gap, who acted as a stand-in and place-holder, who, for his interlocutors, gave body, occupied the space of this gap. All subsequent philosophers concealed this gap by providing a closed ontological

Notes

15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

169

edi¢ce. [. . .] It is crucial here that Heidegger de¢nes Socrates in purely structural terms: what matters is the structural place (of the inconsistency of the Other) he occupies, in which he persists, not the positive content of his teaching [. . .] ``Socrates'' names just a certain POSITION [sic] of enunciation' (B: 108^9). But then again, one almost ¢nds these exact words in Heidegger's 1969 Seminar in Le Thor: `Being, however, for its opening, needs man as the there of its manifestation. [/] [. . .] The human is the place-holder of the nothing' (FS: 63/108). In Being and Time, Heidegger twists himself into complicated knots speaking of Newton's laws in this pre-human era, asking whether or not they can be said to have been `true' in the absence of human beings (BT: 269/226^7). The necessity for these contortions lies in the fact that `beings' cannot be so called before the emergence of `being' as the signi¢cant appearance of these beings. Beings (Seiende) are `be-ings of being (Sein)', active manifestations of signi¢cance, signi¢ers. One major textual clue which allows us to interpret present-at-hand and ready-tohand in this way is the distinction between factuality and facticity: `Facticity is not the factuality of the factum brutum of something present-at-hand, but a characteristic of Dasein's being ^ one which has been taken up into existence' (BT: 174/135, my italics). Translated by Macquarrie and Robinson as `idle talk', but this obscures far more than it reveals. Rafael Winkler's review of Heidegger and the Place of Ethics, `Heidegger and (the) Beyond' (2006a), compelled me to nuance my position on this matter immensely, and this pointed me in the direction I take here. I am thoroughly indebted to his criticisms in this way. My response to him in the same volume was an attempt to come to terms with the trauma of his incision, which ^ as Lacan insisted ^ is always a rewriting of history . . . Cf. Kant (1987 [1790]), Critique of Judgement, Part I, Division I, Book II, B `On the Dynamically Sublime in Nature'. (Pluhar translates `Macht' with `might'.) And yet we should recall that the subject becomes a subject only after it has entered the signi¢er: compare the third of Lacan's graphs of desire (Lacan 2006: 681^92). Is Lacan speaking rather of the constitution than the presupposition of a subject? For the following passage, see `The Subversion of the Subject and The Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious', pp. 671^702 in Lacan 2006 in its entirety.

Chapter 5: Heidegger and Marxism: `a Productive Dialogue' 1.

`In the ¢rst beginning wonder was the grounding-attunement, since physis lit up in and as aletheia. The other beginning, that of being-historical thinking, is attuned and pre-tuned by horror [Entsetzen]' (CTP: 340/484). 2. `When we speak of capacity for labour, we do not speak of labour' (CI: 277). This is to say that labour in itself and in its qualitative diversity is not what contributes to that labour's exchange-value, its value as a commodity: this diversity produces usevalue, it works on an object of nature in order to make it serve a need of the human being: `He sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs' (CI: 283). `We use the abbreviated expression ``useful labour'' for labour whose utility is represented by the use-value of its product, or by the fact that its product is a

170

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

Notes use-value' (CI: 132). Labour-power is only the bare capacity to labour and it is that commodity which needs to be reproduced in order for value to continue to be expanded: `A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour [i.e., irrespective of its qualitative kind, understood as pure labour capacity] is objecti¢ed or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the ``value-forming substance'', the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration' (CI: 129). The creation of surplus value `needs a commodity whose use-value is a source of value, whose consumption is an objecti¢cation of labour and so a creation of value. This commodity is the capacity for labour [ArbeitsvermÎgen], which is labour power [Arbeitskraft]' (CI: 270). Once one removes the quality of labour, only the bare quantity remains (CI: 136), and this means the capacity of the worker to labour which can be measured in terms of how long he can keep his productive activity going before he drops dead, his power to labour: `The value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner' (CI: 274), which maintaining means to `renew his life process' (CI: 276). Althusser regards this step back from labour to the capacity to labour as the source of Marx's critique of political economy (cf. Althusser 1970 [1968]: 22^3). It is precisely the way in which he avoids presupposing labour as the natural essence of man. We shall show that these texts, contra Althusser, are continuous with the concerns of Capital, rather than an earlier problematic separated by a break. As a result, if there is a humanism in the early Marx, it will endure in the later (cf. Althusser 2005 [1965]: 223^41). `What Marx recognized in an essential and signi¢cant sense, though derived from Hegel, as the estrangement of the human being has its roots in the homelessness of modern human beings [. . .]. Because Marx by experiencing estrangement attains an essential dimension of history, the Marxist view of history is superior to that of other historical accounts' (LH: 258^9/170). `[T]he animal does not ``relate'' itself to anything, it does not ``relate'' itself at all. For the animal its relation to others does not exist as a relation' (GI: 49). We have discussed this di¡erence with the assistance of Lacan in Chapter 2. Once again we see the relation between the emergence of desire and the emergence of techne, the bridging of a gap between man and his environment. This is the very origin of Lacan's thought. Interestingly, Marx does refer to the possibility of a nature that would escape history altogether, a trace of that which preceded the very existence of human beings, in the guise of `a few Australian coral islands of recent origin' (GI: 46) ^ in other words, those only recently raised from the sea. These would be entities untouched by human hands, not inscribed with a human mark which could then be transmitted as history. But then again, Marx identi¢es one's wife and child as the original form of property (GI: 52). This puts us at odds with Althusser's analysis, which separates a certain humanism on the part of the early Marx from the `theoretical anti-humanism' of the later (Althusser 2005 [1965]: 229). We follow Henry (Henry 1998: 118) in our belief that Marx's early work on the ontology of the human is what necessitates the supplement of economics and exchange addressed in the later work. We `side' with Henry, but once again our approach is as yet so inchoate that we hardly feel con¢dent enough to `take sides'.

Notes

171

10. `[U]nder the pressure of hitherto existing conditions its interest has not yet been able to develop as the particular interest of a particular class' (GI: 69). 11. Cf. Laclau, `Populism: What's in a Name': http://www.essex.ac.uk/centres/ TheoStud/newsletter.asp (accessed 3/3/2007). 12. Heidegger remarks upon the Marxian understanding of man's position within nature: `Marx demands that ``the human being's humanity'' be recognized and acknowledged. He ¢nds it in ``society''. The ``social'' human is for him the ``natural'' human. In ``society'' human ``nature'', that is, the totality of ``natural needs'' (food, clothing, reproduction, economic su¤ciency), is equably secured' (LH: 244/151). 13. Thus technology is `the destiny of metaphysics and its completion' (M: 151/173). Thanks to technology, the constant presence that was from the beginning taken to characterize being can now be instantiated in beings. `Constancy of presencing completes itself in the arrangement and enactment of the essence [Wesens] of power as machination. ``Technology'' as the truth of beings in their beingness' (M: 330 n./372 n.). This is the meaning of Heidegger's references to the eternal return as the essence of technology, the constant replacement of that which is consumed: `the essence of modern technology ^ the steadily rotating recurrence of the same' (WCT: 109/47). `What else is the essence of modern power-driven machinery [modernen Kraftmaschine] than one o¡shoot [Ausformung] of the eternal return of the same?' (NII: 233/124) 14. Heidegger's fascinating analysis of power and communism in Koinon from Geschichte des Seyns expresses the twofold nature of Heidegger's stance towards communism and capitalism: on the one hand he stresses the essential sameness of these apparently opposed state-forms, and on the other he privileges communism as a more self-aware form of politics. All state-forms today would be alike in considering political a¡airs in terms of power, just as a pre-revolutionary bourgeois politics does for Marx. The di¡erence between these forms is merely one of revelation: one does not see that one is dominated by power in democratic regimes, whereas it becomes quite blatant in a dictatorship (GA69: 189). For Heidegger this means that all politics would remain indi¡erent and would not question or truly respond to the event of manifestation characteristic of its time, in which being is revealed as power: `Power [Macht] is thus the name for the being of beings' (GA69: 182). Heidegger goes on to say that power becomes unconditional not in its uninhibited exercise by a dictator, but when it is shared among all in communism, when its ubiquity perhaps renders it tacit, invisible: `The empowering of power [ErmÌchtigung der Macht] in the unconditionedness of machination, and from out of this is the essence of ``communism'' ' (GA69: 191). Cf. Beistegui 2007 for a fascinating reading of these passages. 15. On production and praxis, see FS: 52/352^3. 16. Americanism must surely be understood to be the object intended by what Marx calls `capitalism'. That Heidegger retains one word (`communism') and not the other (`capitalism') perhaps implies that his understanding of the relation between quantity and quality in `Americanism' has a di¡erent ground to Marx's understanding of exchange-value as a reduction of the qualitative diversity of use-value. 17. This is also why the current panacea of renewable energy is still in itself questionable, since it views nature in a way that does not seem conducive to its fundamental salvation from man's predations. It is still a relation of exploitation, of setting upon.

172

Notes

18. Although at the same time it has to be admitted that things are as much alienated by exchange-value as man is by exchange. 19. Thus, Heidegger recommends us explicitly to `unconditionally actualize this spirit [of technology] so that we simultaneously come to know the essence of its truth' (HI: 53/66, cf. CTP: 122/173 et al.).

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Acknowledgements

An earlier version of Chapter Three appeared as `Individuation in Levinas and Heidegger: The One and the Incompleteness of Beings' in Philosophy Today, Volume 51, Number 2 (Summer 2007). It appears here by kind permission of its editor, David Pellauer. An earlier version of Chapter Four appeared as `Between Nature and Culture: Heidegger and Z­iz­ek on the Thing and the Subject' in The Journal for Lacanian Studies, Issue 3, Number 2 (Autumn 2006). It appears here by kind permission of its editor, Dany Nobus. The history of this book: Chapter Three was originally written in early 2004, and entirely rewritten from an altogether di¡erent perspective in early 2006. Chapters One and Four develop thoughts contained in the conclusion of Heidegger and the Place of Ethics and were gestated in the summer of 2005 before being summarized in the form of a single talk given at the conference of the Society for European Philosophy and the Forum for European Philosophy in September 2005. They were written up in the form of two essays in early 2006. In early 2007, the systematicity of all these pieces was explicitly brought out and completed as far as possible with the addition of two further chapters, Chapters Two and Five, together with the Preface. The manuscript was completed in March 2007. Like all systems, in all sorts of places it remains open and projects into the future. It was created in spite of many obstacles ^ emotional, ¢nancial, bureaucratic. But today, thinking takes place only in the face of resistance, the need to think arising only from aporia, when no path immediately presents itself and a way forward or back must be sought. Therefore, these obstacles are the only things I have to thank for the production of this book. The philosophical response to adversity is to understand what underlies it, what conditions it. Perhaps thereby the obstacles are sublated, surmounted in a way that does not forget them but which is not weighed down by their memory. And perhaps this is how we should understand past traumas, as turning points in the history of our thinking, and thus turn them to some pro¢t and spite the loss of time.

Acknowledgements

181

For all these reasons, by way of `acknowledgements' I include only this `in spite of '. I can only hope that this di¤cult birth has not left its mark, save here. Michael Lewis Coventry, UK March 2007

Index

alienation 34, 134, 136, 139^43, 145^6, 150 Americanism 147, 171n. 16 see capitalism, Russia animal 3, 6, 17, 29, 40^3, 68, 71, 73, 74, 110, 134^7, 139^40, 142^3, 145, 152n. 2, 153n. 4, 157n. 12, 159n. 30, 165n. 28, 170n. 5 artwork 42, 45, 72, 156n. 1 see work of art beings as a whole 4, 7, 11, 14^19, 28, 31, 32, 39, 45, 81, 84, 87, 90, 92, 93, 96, 99, 100, 100, 103, 124, 155n. 24, 156n. 30, 168n. 12 beings as such 14, 29, 87, 100, 147 bourgeois 143, 144, 171n. 14 capitalism 4, 7, 8, 76, 129, 131, 133, 142, 143, 146, 147, 149, 150, 168n. 6, 171n. 14, 171n. 16 communism 4, 130, 133, 134, 140, 142, 145^50, 168n. 8, 171n. 6, 171n. 14 community 142, 144, 148 consumption 61, 77, 95, 128, 139, 147, 148, 170n. 2 deconstruction 3, 6, 8, 16, 35, 43, 125, 126, 128, 133, 161n. 40 see Derrida, Jacques Deleuze, Gilles 166n. 35 Derrida, Jacques 3, 5, 11, 34, 35, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 96, 102, 126, 152n. 1, 153n. 4, 156n. 32, 159n. 29, 161n. 40, 161n. 1, 161n. 2, 162n. 4, 163n. 10, 164n. 23, 165n. 25 see deconstruction

desire 50, 51^3, 55^9, 110, 123, 137, 140, 158n. 16, 158n. 20, 163n. 10, 164n. 21, 164n. 21, 169n. 20, 169n. 21, 170n. 6 see drive Ding, das 6, 46^50, 56, 62, 63, 65, 67, 75, 156n. 1, 158n. 17, 160n. 35 see fourfold, thing divinities 2, 10, 65, 68, 99 see gods drive 55^61, 77, 108, 110, 111, 117, 122, 158n. 21 earth 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 29, 30, 35, 37, 38, 43, 64, 65, 68, 71, 79, 93, 94^6, 99, 121, 122, 123, 124, 128, 129, 132, 147, 150^1, 155n. 18, 155n. 19, 156n. 30, 159n. 30, 160n. 36, 165n. 31 economics 4, 77, 129, 134, 139, 141, 142, 144, 147^50, 170n. 9, 171n. 12 economy 1, 131, 134, 152n. 1, 170n. 2 ego 81^85, 86, 88^93, 95^96, 102, 110 empty signi¢er 102, 109, 124, 125, 155n. 27, 162n. 9, 163n. 10, 163n. 13, 164n. 22, 166n. 35 see point de capiton enjoyment 55^8, 95, 139, 162n. 9, 165n. 27 Europe 16, 127, 147, 149 event 2^5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 18, 19, 31, 33^6, 39, 40, 41, 43, 63, 65, 66, 69, 76, 78, 80^1, 83, 84, 90, 92, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104, 105, 109, 112, 113, 116, 117, 119, 125^7, 128^9, 131, 133, 148^9, 153n. 1, 153n. 6, 161n. 40, 164n. 16, 166n. 33, 171n. 14

Index exchange 6, 74, 93, 130, 131, 134^5, 137^42, 145, 146, 169n. 2, 170n. 9, 171n. 16, 172n. 18 exchange-value 130, 137, 140, 141, 169n. 2, 171n. 16, 172n. 18 existence 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 26, 29, 31, 33, 35, 37, 40, 49, 53, 63, 66, 89, 90, 91, 95, 110, 145, 164n. 17, 169n. 16 fourfold 2, 10, 14, 29, 33, 35, 64, 65, 72, 75, 124, 125, 153n. 7, 156n. 1, 165n. 31 see das Ding, thing god

1, 2, 10, 15, 31, 32, 35, 40, 47, 52, 58, 65, 72, 87, 98, 100, 124, 125, 156n. 1, 156n. 30, 159n. 23, 160n. 36, 162n. 7, 163n. 11, 166n. 32 see divinities Greece 16 Greek 42, 72, 92, 93, 99, 128, 132, 159n. 30, 162n. 4, 162n. 6, 164n. 19 history 2^5, 12, 14, 15, 32, 38, 39, 44^7, 59, 62, 69, 112, 115, 130, 133^4, 137^8, 143^4, 146^8, 154n. 14, 155n. 25, 156n. 36, 161n. 40, 166n. 35, 168n. 12, 170n. 4, 170n. 7 historical 2, 14, 16, 18, 24, 25, 34, 38, 39, 44^7, 72, 77, 78, 98, 99, 109, 112, 113, 115, 116, 126, 140^4, 137^8, 143, 146^8, 150, 152n. 1, 153n. 1, 155n. 25, 156n. 33, 158n. 15, 160n. 39, 168n. 12, 169n. 1, 170n. 4 human 1^11, 13, 15, 18, 29, 30, 32, 38^43, 45^7, 53^4, 56, 59^63, 65, 66, 70^3, 81, 83, 91^7, 98, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123^5, 127^133, 135, 136, 138, 140^2, 144^51, 153n. 2, 153n. 4, 155n. 24, 157n. 7, 157n. 12, 159n. 28, 161n. 3, 163n. 11, 165n. 28, 165n. 29, 168n. 14, 169n. 2, 169n. 14, 169n. 15, 170n. 2, 170n. 4, 170n. 7, 171n. 12 humanism 7, 30, 98, 103, 118, 120, 128, 130, 133, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 153n. 4, 165n. 29, 170n. 39

183

individuation 25, 51, 81, 83, 90, 92^4, 96^9, 102^3, 119, 164n. 24, 166n. 33, 166n. 35 industrial 61, 68, 131, 135, 138, 143, 152n. 1, 161n. 40, 161n. 42 jouissance

55^6

labour 95, 121, 131^4, 139, 141^56, 169n. 2, 170n. 2 labour-power 131^2, 141^3, 170n. 2 Lacan, Jacques 6^8, 37^9, 41, 43, 46^62, 68, 71, 77, 98, 99, 101^2, 107, 108, 109, 113, 116, 117, 123, 124, 125, 126, 156^7n. 1, 158n. 16, 158n. 17, 158n. 19, 158n. 21, 161n. 40, 166n. 34, 167n. 2, 169n. 20, 169n. 21, 170n. 6 Laclau, Ernesto 8, 102, 109, 123^4, 129, 143, 144, 171n. 11 Levinas, Emmanuel 7, 8, 80, 81^98, 102^4, 157n. 1, 161n. 2, 161n. 4, 162n. 4, 162n. 6, 162n. 9, 163n. 10, 163n. 11, 163n. 12, 163n. 13, 164n. 18, 164n. 19, 164n. 20, 164n. 21, 164n. 22, 164n. 23, 165n. 25, 165n. 27, 165n. 28, 166n. 35 life 13, 17, 18, 25, 28, 29, 38, 45, 52, 56, 68, 74, 79, 90, 109, 123, 131, 134^8, 139, 140^2, 144^5, 150, 152n. 3, 157n. 12, 168n. 7, 170n. 2 Marx, Karl 7, 8, 9, 128^46, 148, 150, 151, 170n. 4, 170n. 7, 170n. 8, 170n. 9, 171n. 12, 171n. 16 Marxian 130, 171n. 12 Marxism 4, 128^30, 133, 146^8 Marxist 129, 133, 146, 170n. 4 mathematics 156n. 31 meaning 11^14, 16^18, 22, 24^6, 28, 29, 31, 35, 40, 41, 61, 100^2, 110, 118, 122, 153n. 1, 154n. 14 metaphysics 4, 11^17, 22, 28, 29, 31^4, 40, 41, 68, 69, 74, 82, 87, 93, 97^100, 103, 112, 115, 116, 129^34, 146^50, 153n. 4, 154n. 10, 155n. 29, 171n. 13 mortals 2, 10, 65, 68, 70, 71, 75, 78, 89, 95, 96

184

Index

National Socialism 112, 126, 149 natural science 1, 15, 120, 121, 123 Nazism 106^9, 111, 112, 114^18, 153n. 1 Nietzsche, Friedrich 15, 29, 32, 45, 130, 135, 156n. 32 objective spirit 113^5 ontotheology 31, 98, 166n. 32 physics 156n. 31, 160n. 38 poiesis 131^2 point de capiton 101, 124, 166n. 34 praxis 131^3, 171n. 15 present-at-hand 20^3, 26^7, 30, 31, 33, 34, 73, 74, 90, 100, 106^7, 118^23, 156n. 31, 161n. 39, 169n. 16 presence-at-hand 19, 27, 30 production 30, 53, 54, 58, 61, 63, 69, 74, 78, 79, 125, 128, 129, 131, 133^48, 157n. 9, 159n. 26, 171n. 15 proletariat 8, 9, 39, 128, 133, 142^4, 150 ready-to-hand 10, 21, 22, 24, 26, 27, 30, 31, 33, 34, 52, 44, 73, 74, 95, 106, 107, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 154n. 16, 155n. 27, 160n. 39, 169n. 16 readiness-to-hand 4, 128^30, 133, 146^8 revolution 115, 131, 133, 138, 143, 150 revolutionary 7, 39, 76, 116, 126, 132, 133, 148, 149, 159n. 32, 161n. 40, 171n. 14 Russia 149, 161n. 40 science 1, 15, 31, 41, 43, 44, 67, 69, 87, 119^21, 123, 131, 156n. 32, 158n. 12, 160n. 38, 162n. 4 selfhood 19, 32, 35, 146 sign 26^8, 32, 34, 36, 37, 66, 79, 127, 155n. 26, 155n. 27, 155n. 28 signi¢cance 11^13, 21^8, 31, 32, 33, 38, 40, 41, 45, 64, 65, 66, 69, 74, 79, 116, 118^20, 122, 124, 125, 156n. 31, 169n. 15 signi¢cation 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 20, 21, 23, 24, 27, 29, 31^8, 40, 43, 80, 81, 98, 99, 101, 105, 109, 116, 118, 119, 120, 122^6, 154n. 11, 155n. 16

signi¢ed 35, 47, 101, 102, 120, 124, 125, 158n. 16, 166n. 34 signi¢er 23, 26, 27, 38, 39, 44, 46^61, 65, 69, 76, 99, 101^3, 120, 124, 125, 155n. 27, 166n. 34 singularity 10, 16, 34, 40, 63^5, 68, 78, 85, 89, 90, 91, 98, 99, 112, 119, 124, 126, 146, 157n. 1, 160n. 38, 162n. 5, 164n. 18, 164n. 20 society 133, 138^46, 171n. 12 sublimation 53^7, 59, 61 sublime 58, 60, 123, 169n. 19 techne 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 30, 38, 42^7, 61, 69, 72, 76, 77, 79, 95, 100, 125, 131, 132, 134, 136, 140, 142, 145, 157n. 2, 157n. 10, 157n. 12, 160n. 36, 170n. 6 technology 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 11, 14, 15, 39, 42, 44, 45, 61, 66^9, 71^4, 77^80, 100, 112, 115, 120, 126, 131, 148, 149, 150^1, 152n. 1, 156n. 31, 157n. 9, 160n. 36, 162n. 6, 171n. 13, 172n. 19 temporarity (Zeitlichkeit) 13, 17, 18, 28, 29, 78, 100, 153n. 1 tool 3, 19, 21, 23, 27, 38, 41^4, 51, 53, 58, 71, 95, 119^21, 134, 139, 155n. 19, 157n. 7 understanding of being 7, 19, 20, 28, 30, 31, 96, 105, 116, 128, 133, 165n. 25 use-value 55, 64, 130, 135, 140, 146, 169^70n. 2, 171n. 16 void

7, 18, 24, 29, 31^5, 38^9, 43, 46, 49, 51^3, 57^65, 68, 76^8, 80, 81, 84, 98, 99, 100^2, 108, 116^7, 122, 124^5, 150, 155n. 27, 156n. 36, 160n. 39, 161n. 40, 167n. 2, 168n. 13, 168n. 14

work of art

54, 55, 59, 72, 159n. 22

Z­iz­ek, Slavoj 8^9, 57, 81, 98^9, 103^4, 105^19, 122^6, 128^30, 133, 159n. 32, 166^7n. 1, 167n. 2, 167n. 3, 168n. 7, 168n. 8, 168n. 10, 168n. 12, 168n. 13, 168n. 14